Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes hands over creepy to-do list better suited for a robot

I always call b*******

Yup, I always call my friends too.

TIL: some pretty innocuous words are taboo here, and will get your post removed.

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Or some people are just early risers.

First article I found about actual times sez:

Some of the world’s most successful people get up early. Richard Branson [reportedly] gets up at 5.45am, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner wakes up at 5.30am, Apple CEO Tim Cook gets up at 3.45am, Oprah gets up at 6am and Elon Musk rises at 7am, to name just a few.

Frankly, the only one I find remarkable it Tim Cook. That’s a strange time that doesn’t match the beginning of late shifts, like in hospitals.

Everythingh else isn’t really out of the line for working shlobs who have to open stores as 7 am, start the early shift, etc…. I mean, school starts at 7:30 in lots of places, so if you don’t want to rush, 6:30 is pretty reasonable.

Manual labor in the outside, especially when most of it is the summer? Of course you start as early as possible, to maximum light +tolerable temperatures +

And while I myself may start working at 6:30 next year if my kid picks that school 1 hour bus drive away with classes starting at 7:30, it’s just out of convenience. I don’t assign work ethic to it – I did it before and man, half of the staff just lolls around, surfs and has coffee or read the newspaper, when that was still a thing.

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I get up at 06:00 every day, but my routine consists of:

06:00: Hopefully fumble the right way on my phone’s alarm slider. Get out of bed and curse my achy knees; check in mirror to make sure nothing went missing overnight; throw on dressing gown.

06:01: Start running bath and take a pee while waiting for the water to warm up. Check the temperature of the water and curse my cranky old boiler if it’s still cold (can lead to early morning ad hoc boiler repair).

06:02: Plug bath, morning-mumble at smart speakers to play BBC Radio 4. Curse when smart speakers don’t recognise my voice that hasn’t been used for 8+ hours.

06:03: Boil kettle and start making sandwiches for work.

06:08: Sit down and have my cup of tea and an apple (tea at this time of year is Black Chai, which is delightfully festive).

06:11: Panic when I realise the bath is possibly overflowing. Run to bathroom and stop it.

06:12: Take a shit. This is non-negotiable, and my body lets me know it.

06:14: Wash ass before getting in bath. Standards, y’know?

06:15: Brush teeth.

06:19: Bathtime, mmmmmm. Soothes aches and pains, smells good, makes me feel human.

Everything after taking a bath consists of catching up with the world before leaving the flat at around 07:25 so I can walk the 25 minutes to the station and get to work for 08:30.

This seems human to me, and I haven’t really felt the need to write it down before. Once you get in to a routine, why do you need a list to remind you how to do it?

Then again, I’ve never been one for using calendars either. I feel kind of guilty when I see the calendars of colleagues filled with colourful appointments and meetings, while mine is more often than not completely blank, unless I’ve received an invite from one of said colleagues.

But again, if it’s important, I’ll remember it. See note about washing ass.

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I actually time stuff. I need fewer than 15 minutes and 6 litres of water for a complete morning routine of defecation, showering, shaving, dressing. All my socks are of the same color and type, folded into underwear, which is all of the color and type. I call in sick 7.7 days per year on average. (I consider that “being lucky to be healthy”, not “look at how diligent I am”.) Preparing a litre of tea at work takes 3 minutes 30 seconds – it’s nearly physically impossible to do it faster – but that’s just me.

But I don’t do these things on a schedule. That sounds a bit OCD for me, the whole point of me timing such things is that I have a set a buildings blocks I can rely on and assemble each day anew, at need and want.

I think a lot of people confuse “planning” with “scheduling”. IMHO a strict schedule is a bad kind of planning – as soon as one step doesn’t work, the people who rely on it get panicky.

Edit: The 6 litres is for showering. Didn’t measure the toilet and the bit of water I need for shaving.

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Missing the BASIC line numbers in front of each line of code…

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The (delightful) Content Mines podcast recently did a quick comparison of this routine and Patrick Bateman’s description of himself from the opening of American Psycho. You can pretty much seemlessly transition back and forth between them.

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It’s more unnerving than those Jesus paintings that stare at the viewer.

Beg pardon? 3:30 steeping time, perfect for a nice Earl Grey, fine - but boiling one litre of water and steeping anything that would at least approximate anything like tea? No way. Not even first extraction of something really strong.

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We have a ready-to-tap source of 80°C (82°C, actually, when I measured it) water in the kitchen.

Not counting the walk from my desk to the kitchen (about 80 steps) it’s

• grabbing the old glass coffee pot, putting it under the dispenser and hitting “pot”
• walking right to turn on the electric kettle, the main power switch (safety installed timed power switches) to start the kettle “dry”
• grabbing my tea box, East Frisian blend, of course.
• back to the dispenser
• filling the kettle to the one litre mark

• opening my thermos flask which has an integrated sieve
• emptying the leftover tea, if any
• removing the old tea from the the sieve
• putting new tea in and screwing the sieve back to the plug

The electric heater will now have reached boiling temperatue

• I put in the litre of water. Since I believe in physics, I don’t have to check anything but the stop of the waterflow

• screw in plug, walk back

• Take first cup of tee after it steeped long enough. I’m not that picky if it’s a bit stronger.

The tea sieve is now above water level and can’t change the taste anymore.

It’s this model, though I did “hack” it by crafting a handle on a disk matching the interior diameter, so I pull out the old tea leaves in one go.

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Not boiling.

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Did you bother to read the rest? Did you perhaps confuse Fahrenheit with Celsius?

Anyway, I timed it again, for your education.

I started with turning on the kettle. It stopped with wildly boiling water at 70 seconds.

However, it already is boiling after 54 seconds.

Should I provide a video?

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I don’t like its handwriting. Looks like it was written by an adolescent psychopath.

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Yes please!

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One thing to note is that 240 volts that comes standard in British Kitchens is SO MUCH FASTER at boiling water in an electric kettle :smiley:

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09_algjohn1_phixr

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“4:00 A.M. rise & thank God most things are not logical.”

If you look at her note, it seems like those are 2 distinct, unconnected thoughts/observations:
eg, “Rise & thank God” “Most things are not logical.”

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Also, some people go to bed ridiculously early.

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That’s also lifestyle shaming. For me, there’s not much to do after dark. I’m not very interested in television, I don’t go out that often because the interesting (for me) venues like zoos and museums and the like are already closed. Television is about one hour for me – a week on average that this, and that’s already with binging. Cinema has lost its interest to me since I’m snob who watches with subtitles. I don’t “game” anymore.

There’s nothing much I “have” to to after 20 when I read my the kid’s bedtime story. So there’s a whole range of time – sometimes I fall asleep that time too and sometimes I read or program a couple of hours, doesn’t matter, as long as I get about 7 to 8 hours of sleep.

During half-lockdown when school’s were closed in Germany, I simply got up at “Tim Cook” time and out in some hours of remote work done, because it’s near impossible to get a full 7:30 when an 8 year old ist at home all of the time.

So frankly: F the people who make a big deal about early risers, but also F the people laugh about people getting to bet before midnight. Got two of them on the team, but they’ll have to live with not getting a meeting or answer out of me after 15.

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