After several years, my current pair of shoes has finally fallen apart. I don't need to look cool, or any other bells and whistles. I am looking for a simple pair of men's shoes. I want something that preferably doesn't use sweat shops.

Any suggestions?

I saw some topics on note-taking programs and apps, so I felt a topic on note-taking strategies would be a nice complementary one. When I was still a student, I experimented with various note types (mind map, Cornell, bullet points,...) but ever since I started working, I've sort of stopped experimenting. Hence my question: how do you take meeting notes?

My parents are great. That being said, every time my 2.5 year-old comes home it is bananas. They are so over stimulated, who knows what they have eaten. Usually screaming and in just in a state of complete deregulation. I can’t tell if I just need to deal with it as part of grandparent time. We don’t correct my parents, we do offer suggestions and give them food and snacks etc but inevitably what is eaten is some sugary cereal and junk.

Do any of you deal with this? Do I need to chill out? I am writing this as my child falls asleep after screaming for 2 hrs. So I am a still a little frustrated.

Extending a warm Happy Father's Day to all fathers, grandfathers, adoptive fathers, step fathers, god fathers, spiritual fathers, father in law's, soon to be fathers, those who would have been fathers, our departed fathers, and others that I have missed.

May your day be beautiful and wonderful.

Celebrate!

Edit: Okay it's Monday now : ) How'd it go? For fathers with very young children did you guys get home made cards from the mom plus stickers contributed by your child(ren)? Where are you going to store these cards, or do they go straight in the recycling, you monster?

For context: I'm going from southern California to Salt Lake City, Utah, and I'm moving for work. I've never lived alone for an extended period of time before. I figure I've got a handle on it, but there's always something that I forget or don't know, so I'd like to ask you all for advice.

I'm relocating soon and trying to find the right spot for me. I don't want this to be an individual recommendation thread though. Instead, just tell me about your favorite urban neighborhoods — what you love about them, what isn't so great, and what makes them stand out from the rest.

I think many of us are students, or just like self-learning some topics for themselves, perhaps their work requires studying — I think it might be interesting to collect a few tips we have experience with on how to do it efficiently.

I would start with probably one of the best tools in this category that I think are still underutilized by many: spaced-repetition software. Perhaps more people might be familiar with the concept from language learning with word cards, but the base idea is that reinforcing some knowledge at increasing intervals will effectively make you remember it ’forever’. A final selling point on this topic: it only requires 10 minutes out of your entire life to remember a fact for basically forever with instant recall - that’s a very good use of one’s time in my opinion. For more information on it here is a great article.
(It’s talking about Anki, a notable spaced repetition program that is free and open-source (the ios client is paid though, as this is the only income source of the maintainer, but you could just use the web interface as well. Not affiliated))

I have a new niece and I'm making a list of songs which we can play for her naptime when we babysit. I have some Raffi songs and my childhood lullabies (Edelweiss from my mom and Moonshadow from my dad), as well as some calm songs from my Spotify playlist.

But it made me wonder, what songs did your parents sing when you were young? Children's songs? Disney? Pop? Metallica?

I'm also interested in whether you think it's best to keep a small list and rotate through, for comfort's sake, or if it's also okay to have a wider variety of songs as lullabies.

This is a general ask for those that successfully made pivots in their overall careers. What was your experience like? Why did you make it? Did you feel like when you made the pivot you were starting from the bottom? or did you gradually change roles within a single company to ease yourself into the transition?

I'm currently trying to make a change of career (hence the question). My goal is to pivot out of a market research role into a software engineer focused role. Worry constantly creeps in about feasibility. I make good money in the role I'm in so could I take a possible hit to my salary if I had to start in a junior role? I turn 29 this year, and part of me worries if I'm too far down the path to make such a big change. Now, I've tempered some of the fear as I know I could apply my knowledge of research to create tools I've seen the industry in need of. I've dabbled in common languages like HTML, CSS, Lua, JS, Python, and R during my time in research.

Now, I think I've compiled the 3 hardest questions regarding my specific apprehension of moving into software development:

1. Is there like a collectively agreed all-around language that everyone should start with?
2. Is there a formal way to learn a coding language?
3. Even with such little experience, could I still build a solid career in the field?

I don't expect anyone to answer those last three if they don't want to, but I'd love to hear about any and all experiences with career pivots.

My son just graduated high school last week. I was immensity proud and the week leading up to it was super busy getting the house ready for visitors, celebration, etc.

This week had been the opposite, while my kid is visiting his college for orientation I can't help but have this "lost" feeling. Not depression or empty nesting but more of "Now I got to figure out what I want to do when I grow up" mindset.

Did you make any life changes? New hobbies? Did you experience something similar?

While maybe only hitting zero four or five times in the last ten years, I've subscribed to the "inbox zero" / getting things done (GTD) philosophy and have used my email as a to-do list. The people that I lead know to send me emails if they or I are meant to perform work born from the conversation that we've shared. Its been great in not missing anything -- its been horrible from a prioritization standpoint. A third to half of my email are bodiless emails to myself where the subject line would look like a to-do list entry to most others.

I'm curious how you approach your day and keep yourself organized if you're getting and giving work. Do you have a master to-do list that you work off of? Are you living in email all day? How do you keep track of prioritization and ensure that nothing slips between the cracks.

My wife and I are hopefully 4-5 years away from being able to build a house. We frequently have this exchange:

"I definitely want <<feature>> in <<room>>!"
— "You should write that down!"
No one writes anything down

Has anyone used a tool or methodology you liked for a sort of vision board? I've used some basic ones that let you have text nodes (Bathroom ⟩ Shower ⟩ needs recirculation pump), but many ideas are in the form of photos or links that wouldn't be as useful without seeing them.

I'm a software engineer, so I was thinking of trying something like Trello, which is really more for project management but I think could be shoehorned into what I want.

I have the opportunity to purchase a house in a beach town that would double as both a vacation home for myself and a short term rental property. This would be my first foray into the world of short term rentals so I was hoping to get your general advice, guidance, and experience.

I should mention that I think I've got a pretty good grasp on the financial aspects of it, i.e. the mortgage, rental rates, fees to the town and rental platforms, taxes, insurance, etc.

I'm more curious about things such as:

• Do you recommend using an umbrella management company to handle cleaning, maintenance, landscaping, etc. or do you outsource an individual cleaning service, handyman, etc.?
• What type of "filtering" do you recommend to make sure you're renting to people who will respect the property?
• What sort of furniture, linens, etc. do you recommend?
• Are there any gotchas that you didn't expect when getting into this line of work?

So, I have my first child on the way. To say I'm unprepared or overwhelmed isn't exactly accurate, but wouldn't really be wrong either. My wife and I are reasonably intelligent, compassionate, patient people so I have a lot of confidence in our ability to figure this out as we go, but there are some things we have to prepare for before the baby comes.

The big current task is the "baby registry" so I thought I would start a discussion on the things we should actually be asking for, what's worth buying new, and what's worth finding second-hand or making ourselves.

A few things have been gifted to us already but I wanted to start an open discussion of the items that are important, helpful, or even just fun for newborn babies and raising infants and toddlers in a safe, enriching, and comfortable environment.

I thought it might be helpful to request top-level comments for discussion on various aspects of "baby life" and the things a new parent should make sure they have, government or private services and programs to be aware of, or anything else I might be forgetting. I'd like to have this topic focused on first year of life concerns.

I'd like to avoid any discussion of "how to raise your kids" because I think it's such a highly personal thing and also based heavily on what your individual child is like - so I'm really thinking in terms of goods, services, and easing the burden on us, the parents. You don't have to have kids to reply! I think outside perspectives are also very valuable because there are so many preconceived notions about this stuff. I'll post a few top level comments of the things I am personally thinking about, but please feel free to fill in anything you notice is missing, or doesn't fit well in a posted category. I'm happy to change categories as requested as well to be more inclusive or specific.

I'm a journeyman crane operator. I want to talk with people who are looking for a change, or folks that have already done it. Organized labor has long been a old white dudes club, young and diverse people joining already established labor unions helps in the fight against economic injustice. Let's talk about it.

I found it difficult to formulate a topic for this post, but I hope that you'll all "get" what I'm talking about.

You're reading something, maybe in a book, maybe an article online, maybe a comment on Tildes, or Reddit, or a Tweet, anything really.

Do you do anything with it? Do you save it somehow? Do you write it out in a dedicated notebook? Do you share it? If you do, how do you share it?

I'd love to hear about your approaches to this topic, the tools you use, what you like and don't like about your current workflows, the types of content you like to save, how you share it both with people that are close to you in real life, people who are close to you online, and maybe even strangers?

Also, how do you use it once it all ends up wherever it ends up? Do you even use it? Or do you just like the feeling of curating your own personal archive of things you read that meant something to you at some point?

I'll get the ball rolling:

I've gone through a long journey with this myself, starting with bookmarking older services like Instapaper and Pinboard, trying out newer services like Readwise before eventually creating my own (totally worth all the time it took to create now that I have my own "perfect workflow" to save everything from Kindle highlights to Tildes comments!)

I learn a lot from high quality comments online, so it's really important for me to be able to save them, however, I don't trust the built-in functions on sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. (for reasons hopefully now obvious 😅), and because I like to be able to search through them all in one place easily.

The main reason that I refer back to them is usually because I want to share something in conversation (either in person or online), and it's nice to be able to link to the source text quickly. I also like to be able to give people a glimpse into what I'm reading on topics that are important to me, and recently I'm thinking that the best way to do this is to go back to the 90s/00s and embed RSS feeds of my saved highlights on my website, split by topic.

I'm generally okay with the idea that I'm never going to "use" everything I save for anything particularly big or grand; it just feels nice to have a trail of text content that has been influencing my thinking over a long time period to look back on from time to time.

I’m building a new home and we have hard water around here. I want to save our brand new plumbing and fixtures from being loaded up with deposits from day one. I’ve never used a water softener before. What’s the best route to go?

I'm a newly retired 60-year-old, with a 76-year-old spouse. This is really hard sometimes!

I'm trying to stay active in my non-profit, non-commercial endeavors, but I'm finding myself with more time on my hands than I know what to do with.

How you doing?