One thing to take into account is other peoples' kids vs. your kid. It seems like a lot of people like their own kids in particular, not kids in general. Your test only checks how you feel about kids in general.
Since part of this is genetic, it would be interesting to hear how your girlfriend felt about taking care of her sister's kids (and if you have any close relatives with kids, an experiment taking care of them might be an interesting data point).
Although I agree with you that if you don't think your want kids and all of the evidence points against you wanting kids, then not having kids is a good plan.
I've never really understood people's issue with the cold. If you're dressed appropriately you won't actually be cold
I have trouble hitting the exact right amount of warm clothes to bike in. When it's sufficiently cold, I always seem to end up either too cold or too hot (and then I sweat and get cold).
I also don't like biking in the rain, since I can technically wear waterproof pants, but they're not comfortable so I need to change at my destination (and potentially change again when I leave).
I only really bike to work and occasionally to Woodinville.
The Eastrail page has a decent map of full-separated bike trails (not just separate lanes), although it's annoying that some of the trails are "highlighted" in grey.
The green trail north/south through Kirkland, and all of the grey trails following 520 and then north up to Woodinville are bike paths (not bike lanes, totally separated). They occasionally cross roads but it's infrequent. My house is (intentionally) along the 520 path so I can bike to work entirely on small neighborhood streets + the bike path.
I guess my post is targeted to people who already know they want to bike but don't know if they want an e-bike. I should mention that not everyone is going to be happy biking here though. Kirkland is pretty good for biking if bike lanes are good enough for you, and Redmond is weird but mostly fine. Bellevue is mostly suicidal to try to bike through (except along 520).
I also updated the title since I mostly don't talk about Seattle.
Thanks, I updated this to mention both SMT and hyperthreading.
Do you have any trouble with keyboard/mouse noise? I had a Blue Yeti and coworkers said it was distractingly loud when I was typing or clicked my mouse. The quality was excellent but needing a boom arm for calls was excessive.
For WiFi, the biggest issue is that if two devices transmit at the same time, they'll interfere ("collide") and both packets will get dropped and need to be retransmitted. Unlike phone networks, on WiFi there's basically no coordination, so this interference is random and increases birthday-problem style as the network has more devices connected or has more traffic. There's an exponential random backoff protocol to prevent infinite interference, but exponential backoff means exponentially increasing latency.
You can also get interference from devices connected to other WiFi networks on same channel (so just being in a busy part of town or an apartment building can add significant interference).
WiFi's base speed is also limited to the slowest device on the channel, which has to do with the oldest supported protocol version, hardware, and distance. On a public network, you have a fairly high probability that at least one device is old and/or really far from the router, which drops the speed for everyone and makes the interference problem worse (since slower speed means each packet takes longer to send and therefore has more time when interference can disrupt it).
There's a lot of stuff that interacts, so it's possible to have 15 (or even more) people on calls on the same WiFi network, but you'd need:
- A router fast enough that most of the theoretical bandwidth isn't being used (unused bandwidth = lower chance of interference).
- Everyone to be close enough to the router.
- Everyone to be on reasonably modern devices.
Spaces that really care about this will use a bunch of high speed short-range access points (wired together) coupled with software to drop slow devices. It's common-ish at conference centers, but not coffee shops, and even then they're usually targeting acceptable latency/bandwidth for web browsing, not calls.
But yeah, in some cases a voice call on WiFi will work fine even with some other people on the network, but I wouldn't trust all of the necessary stars to align consistently on a public network.
Re: your headphones
I don't know much about non-headset mics. I don't like them because they pick up background/room noise while a mic right in front of your face can filter to just your voice better. I imagine some of them sound fine in a quiet room though.
My guess is that your headphones just don't have a good mic. I'm picky about my headset since most mics are an afterthought.
1Re: overall bandwidth
128 kbps audio sounds fine and video quality is much less important than audio. A typical video call uses 720p video at 30 fps, which Twitch says you can stream at 3 Mbps (and pro streamers probably care more about quality than most people do). I basically wouldn't worry about bandwidth unless you use a physical whiteboard or otherwise need really good video quality.
1Re: latency and WiFi
Most sources talk about one-way latency, even though round-trip is what actually matters (how long it takes for you to react to something you heard and for the other person to hear your reaction). I'm guessing round-trip is technically harder to measure since it includes the human-thinking delay.
Twilio says users start to notice one-way latency above 100 ms, and VOIP providers target under 150 ms. Traditional calls are below 20 ms though (similar latency to talking to someone across a large room). As a lower-bound, musicians get thrown of by ~30 ms of latency.
Note that people can adapt to latency but they do that by having less productive conversations: If you can't naturally do things like interrupt each other, you'll have a less-interactive conversation. I suspect 150 ms is too optimistic.
Bluetooth's AptX codec adds ~40 ms if you're lucky (they market this as "low latency" since the older SBC codec adds up to 200 ms of latency). If I'm understanding things right, two people on a cross-country call using bluetooth headsets are already hitting 140 ms in the best case. I don't know if there's a good way to measure this.
WiFi is harder to quantify since it can add relatively small delays, but the problem is that it's inconsistent (because of interference and being too busy). If audio packets show up inconsistently, the software needs to add buffers to keep everything showing up at the same time. I don't remember the details, but when I last worked on low-latency applications, Also if you chain WiFi routers together you get multiple channels of possible interference and a new layer where you can lose packets. I would expect coffee shop WiFi networks to be bad because they're frequently overloaded and have tons of interference (if they're in a dense area). Home WiFi might be ok in a low-density area.
1
I drink water out of a large insulated water bottle at home since it lets me keep a significant amount of water near me without having to go downstairs to the kitchen all the time (this is especially nice during work). It's also nice that it doesn't have to be upright if I'm doing something like laying on the couch, and it's not a problem if I knock it over on my nightstand[1].
The downside of a insulated water bottle is that it's either larger or has less capacity. My water bottle doesn't fit in a car drink holder or bike bottle carrier, and it's too big to reasonably use when traveling. I use smaller non-insulated water bottles for all of those cases.
My wife sometimes drinks her morning cold-brew coffee out of an insulated mug since it keeps it cold significantly longer than a normal ceramic mug. I drink my coffee fast enough that ceramic mugs are fine.
Just this weekend I was visiting my family and spilled a glass of water all over the nightstand and it was really annoying.