aredditimmigrant

Hah! I thought that was my work VPN when I first saw it. Not sure how much I like that it's actually the site

Went there in 2018, few notes from my trip. Mostly warnings though

1. Bring cash and expect to never have access to your bank acct/cc while you're there ... Everything is off the books there
2. The local cuisine is shit. We stayed with families Airbnb-style in 3-4 towns and asked each of our hosts where their favorite restaurant was. They all pointed to places where the highest price item was a slice of spam and rice. For like $2 USD.. though I may be spoiled, I lived in NYC at the time.

• side note, best meal while we were there was $10 USD in the middle of Havana, buffet with fish/meats, everything, fry bread they made right in front of you

3. Learn the diff between the two currencies before you go there.. plenty of times we thought they meant one and it was really the other.
4. Learn the history, it's a gorgeous place
5. In the cities, the grifters are next level... One told us their empty restaurant was open, only when we sat down and ordered, they said they turned off the ovens/grills for the night, but they know a party at a warehouse and has a friend who drives a cab that can get us there cheaply. We went with him, turning down several cabs while waiting for his friend, and he expected us to basically pay for his drinks all night. Ok/w/e ... then after we bought him a beer or two, he basically passed it around to everyone there. AND THEN asked for us to buy another. Like I get buying you drinks, but then share them around?

When we left, the guy's friend was there and charged us a ride back to our Airbnb. We found out later the amount the million cabbies waiting outside the ware house would've charged to get us back was 1/5th of what the guy's friend charged us.

Another was a "friend" of a friend we had state side who said he'd show us around, we thought it'd be fun, we'd walk around and we'd buy the guy some drinks or dinner/lunch somewhere as a thank you. The stateside friend talked very highly of him, like they were best buddies and knew each other for a while. When it was time to meet up with the guy, he said his friend would be driving us and charge us some outrageous price to drive us around the city. We basically noped out of that ... Turns out my friend state side forgot to mention how much he paid for his exp... It was also one of our last days and we were almost out of cash

Tldr: it's a very pretty place. Lots of history and lots to learn/see. Only issue is communism on the country scale in that country made everyone either starving with terrible food or a grifter.

This is going to sound stereotypical, and I don't smoke often. But last time I had a good high going, the Grateful Dead album, "American Beauty", came on my music album shuffle and just instantly got me in the right mood.

Rereading this a few days later, a few items come to mind

2a. Date night doesn't have to be fancy. A nice walk in a nearby park, or just a night where you can sleep/chill/watch TV together does the same as a nice dinner/drinks out on the town (and doesn't require you to dress up). The point is that you do something non-baby related TOGETHER.

8. You're going to get tons of advice on how to raise the kid. The only piece of advice you need is this. When you get the advice, thank the person. Run it through your personal filter. If you like it, talk it through with your partner and decide if you both like it and help to implement it.

9. You don't know them now, but you'll learn the "I'm hungry" vs "I'm tired" vs "I have a full diaper" cries soon. It's ok if it takes a while.

Yeah. IMHO Spicy is always a weird one and should be treaded carefully. But spiced is a must.

Father of a 2.5 yr old here ... Have a few friends who just had kids as well.. I told them the same shpiel

1. The next few months will be the toughest thing you ever go through (comparable to back to back all nighters in college, but this time it's for a few months)... Esp if you're working and don't have good paternity leave. But after you get over that hump. .... It gets a lot better and now you're in the club where everyone knows what you went through because they've been through it too.
2. If your/your partners parents are in the picture and offer to babysit. Take up the offer. Go have a date night with your partner... It'll relieve a lot of stress
3. If you live in a decent area, go for walks with the little one as often as you can. (in a bassinet/stroller obviously)
4. If you're in a western country... If you ever feel like you're doing too little, the littlest amount of effort on your part gets much more props than the amount of effort. Just being there for your new kid and changing every 10th diaper is doing better than 60% of dads out there.
5. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has amnesia about the next 6ish months. They'll say things like "why are you so tired? I don't understand!" Or "it wasn't that bad when we had kids".... It was. They just blocked it out
6. When the kid gets off milk, any spices yall use usually in cooking. Or just generally like that aren't spicy. Expose it to them ASAP. It does wonders for their pallet and they'll be less picky in a few years
7. Both you and your partner are stressed. You will fight and hate each other. Don't make any big life decisions for the next few months.

Hope this helps... Enjoy the journey.

Yeah .... I wasn't sure when I wrote it and didn't think it'd matter tbh

Not only for iPhone, but for Mac as well. It's easy to install bsd on a machine when you have access to the best hw engineers and documenters on the planet.

Thank you, exactly

Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI

For phone calls that's just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.

There's an old saying in computing. "you improve usability by taking away options and features" apple didn't necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.

They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it "popular" by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they've made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.

They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn't want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.

For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn't want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.

Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn't invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn't invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They've done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.

"Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows"

Mine also allows you to see each voicemail in your acct inbox and play/delete/call back each one like a song on a media player.

There's still the cell providers limit on how many voicemails are allowed though. Better to use Google voice and have unlimited voice mail