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More lucrative: Dines would encourage consultants to introduce UiPath to their clients by letting the consultants keep as much as 80% of the overall bot-related spend in exchange for setting up and maintaining the program. Suddenly some of the world’s biggest companies were serving as little UiPath’s sales force.

From Communism To Coding: How Daniel Dines Of $7 Billion UiPath Became The First Bot Billionaire

Brilliant.

“I work really hard at the company, but only at things I like. Being a lazy person, I had to build better pattern recognition in life.”

This, above, is one of the mistakes I’ve made. I’m pretty good at delegating what I’m not skilled at, but I’m not as good at it as I want to be.

Read the entire article: From Communism To Coding: How Daniel Dines Of $7 Billion UiPath Became The First Bot Billionaire

One of the things I wished I understand a whole lot better is the regex rules. While I can hack an already existing rule to adapt it for my own needs, I can’t start one from scratch. To be fair, I don’t think I can adapt one if my need is more complicated.

Recently I’ve discovered Regex Crossword and I’m having fun with it. I test myself from time to time, when I get bored. Who knows, maybe something will actually stick.

Here’s what they say on their About page:

Regex Crossword is a crossword puzzle game, where the crossword clues are defined using regular expressions. The site is created and maintained by Maria Hagsten Michelsenand Ole Bjørn Michelsen. Everybody can play and it is a great way for newcomers to learn regular expressions and for experts to practice their skills.

via

I loathe sun. Not the sun itself, actually, because I love warmth, but I hate the blinding light it emanates most of the time. I know, right? Stupid, shitty sun…

I started using computers when I was 6, so I was “blessed” with light sensitivity. My eye sight is really sharp, I don’t need glasses or anything, but really bright lights make me want to live in a cave for most of my life.

All of the above means that I wear sunglasses when I go out. All the time, even when it’s cloudy. That white, milky light on a cloudy day is even worse than bright light in a really sunny day, at 2pm.

Because of all this I was looking for the perfect pair of sunglasses my whole life. And, to keep going on the quality of life improvements series I started on this blog with the rollerblade wheels of the office chair, read on to see if I found the sunglasses. Spoiler: I did.

The perfect sunglasses attributes:

• be as light weight as possible
• have the “around the eyes”/”around the head” shape, to cover the extremities of my eyes as well and not fall when I move my head around (including playing sports, if possible)
• lens category 3 UV protection
• the small things that “sit” on the nose should be part of the sunglasses, not separate pieces
• as indestructible as possible
• not overly expensive. €50 would be the top price

Over the years I found different pairs that had some of the attributes I was looking for, but none were perfect. Until someday, I was accompanying my better half in her pursuit of sunglasses and I entered a shopping mall optics store. And, because I was getting bored, I asked the lady if she had anything with the above qualities. And what do you think? She recommended the perfect sunglasses: the sexy called Polaroid P7334 Rectangular Sunglasses.

The only bad thing, though: they were around €80. I bought a pair, because they were too good to pass. After several weeks of wearing them, I wanted to have another pair in the car, another pair at my parents, another pair in the toilet, one in the kitchen. Well, not really, but you get the point.

So I looked on Amazon. And I found out that the store in the shopping mall had at least a 150% profit margin on them. When I’m writing this, the price on Amazon is exactly where I want it. Less than my top limit, actually.

What makes these sunglasses so great?

• They’re really, really light.
• They stretch a lot, so you can sit on them without any issue (which is the way I’ve messed up most of my sunglasses).
• Sometimes the lens fall and you can put them back immediately.
• They wrap around the head and they don’t let the sun light reach your eyes.
• They are made out of a silicone-like rubbery material.

So, here are the links for the sunglasses on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de. You know, to support my reading habit. Or my habit of buying these sunglasses, because right now I have three (one in the car, two around the house) and I’ve had around 5 or 6. I manage to forget them everywhere. With one exception.

If you don’t want to buy a pair, you can try to find one I lost while trying to learn how to standup paddle on one of the rivers of Portugal. This is one con of the sunglasses: they don’t float. Unfortunately.

I play games on PS4 and Nintendo Switch. The platforms are quite different in terms of what type of games are popular on each one, so each has its own use.

Today I was looking for some story driven games on Nintendo Switch because I want to play some in hand-held mode. I found several on reddit, but I also found this link for the “story rich” tag on the Nintendo e-shop:

Story rich games on Nintendo switch

Use it, in case you need it. I wrote this blog post just because I thought it might be interesting for others looking for the same thing. And I also wanted the link to be in a place where I can find it easily.

Oh, in the end I’ve picked up Celeste, Undertale and Bayonetta 2. Celeste is giving me nightmares with the difficulty, Undertale is a little… underwhelming. And Bayonetta is NOT something I’m used playing.

Photo by Ryan Quintal on Unsplash

Several years ago, before 2008-2009, when blogging was just starting in Romania, I remember talking to somebody and saying that, at some point, a real-estate developer might want to pay a blogger to live rent free in one of their apartments to promote the building(s). I actually tried to find someone to pay me for that, but I think it was too early. Or I wasn’t interesting enough. Well, no, that couldn’t be it, right? :)

Yesterday I was reading an article on the life of an Instagram influencer that started as a kid blogger: Who Would I Be Without Instagram? An investigation. She was actually paid to live rent free in a luxury apartment in New York.

This is where the luxury rental building comes in. I was asked to live at 300 Ashland, right by the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, as part of a campaign the real-estate company Two Trees was doing to promote three new developments. In a deal that covered my rent for a year, I agreed to do press about the building, host an event for my followers on its plaza, and post about the building and neighborhood on my account. I’d long shared my living space online and decided to see this as no different, except I would get paid. And so, for a year, I lent my face to promote a borrowed home.

Who Would I Be Without Instagram? An investigation

It only took 10 years to see it happening, but I’m happy I was mostly right. You can read the story of the apartment here as well.

The initial article is really good and puts a lot of things into perspective: from the fake image we put online, no matter how good we are with “being real” to the costs it carries.

The lady in the article – Tavi Gevinson – also expands her online influence to an online business, then she moves to acting.

In some ways I feel a kinship with that, since I started online as a blogger, before becoming an entrepreneur and, apparently, a blogger again. I also have an Instagram account I rarely use, so there’s that, as well.

Photo from Canva. Article via Ben Evans’s newsletter

Q: Euro Disney really took off once you realized that French parents wanted fine wine at the restaurants to get them through the day.
Bob Iger: I know it was an issue.

The Slow-Burning Success of Disney’s Bob Iger

During the weekend I read this article on Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney. He talks about buying Pixar, Marvel and 21st Century Fox, he talks about his way of doing things. Quite an interesting op-ed.

The quote above, though, made me wonder how many small decisions make the success stories though.

I mean, who would think that not having wine in a menu (at a children’s park, especially) would make the place less successful?

Photo via Canva, article via Ben Evans’ newsletter

The question I answered in this video is “Should I start a side business while working a 9 to 5 job?”

To start with the conclusion: if you want to really succeed, I don’t think it’s recommended to start a side business while holding a full time job. A business you can’t focus on most of your time is most likely going to fail.

If you start a hobby or you don’t care about revenues or success of the business, then you can start whenever you want.

Transcript:

Should I start a side business while working a nine-to-five job?

No, I don’t think you should do that. I come from a school of thought that says you should need to focus on one thing and do it really really well. I can understand that your case might be different: you have a family, you have a mortgage, you need money to live. It all means you need the money from the nine-to-five job.

If that’s the case, what I would suggest is that you save money for at least six months or a year of living without generating of revenue.

Cut your costs as much as possible, as much as you can, so that it becomes easier to live off the money that you that you saved and once you’ve done that, bite the bullet and start the company.

If the business doesn’t work, you can always go back and find a job even if it takes a little bit longer. The business will not be a success if you can’t focus on doing just that.

It can’t really work. Yes, there are exceptions to that, but most of the people don’t really make it work. You can start an online business, you can find ways to create a side revenue, but I don’t think that a side revenue from writing for other sites, let’s say, is a side business.

If you really want a business, you need to focus on that, so save some money, cut the costs and bite the bullet and quit your job and start the company.

I’m crazy about Christmas. The thing is, I wasn’t as crazy about Christmas when I was a kid as I’m now, at forty-something.

What happened in between?

Well, as an adult, the holidays season (including Christmas, of course, and New Year’s) is the most quiet period of the year. Nobody sends you emails, nobody wants something urgent from you. Except family, but hopefully you manage/like that part of your life.

Once I understood why I loved the quiet period, I started to associate things with it: Christmas carols, the Christmas tree, Christmas lights… This means that once the summer is over, I want the Christmas feeling as early as possible. So right now I’m negotiating with my fiancée having a Christmas tree starting with October…

I’m also listening to Christmas songs right now. Just because I can.

Starting with January 24th, 2020, we’re gonna see the first new episodes of a Star Trek series with Jean-Luc Picard.

Like many people my age (I’m 41 now), the first Star Trek I’ve ever watched was The Next Generation. Picard, Data, Riker, Worf, Troi, Geordi, they were all names we grew up with and vastly enjoyed watching. For me, in particular, it might be the thing that made me love SF in all its forms: movies, TV series and, most of all, books.

While the new series is not around those characters (with the exception of Picard, of course), some of them will appear in the new series. I’ve seen glimpses of Data, Riker and Troi in the trailer. You can also see Seven of Nine, from Voyager, who seems to be playing a much larger role than the other ones.

This is one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while. It shows what you can do if some newsletter doesn’t unsubscribe you when you ask for it.

As a bonus, you can also watch the following video on how to talk with email scammers. It’s the same person (James Veitch) and it’s as funny as the previous one.

Image from Canva