Thomil's Random Ramblings

So, back at the end of August, I took a first good look at DropChef , a meal kit delivery service that I’d signed up for to spice up my weekly menu. First impressions were pretty good but of course, two weeks is not enough to form a proper opinion. So, naturally, I had to revisit that topic again a little later. Actually, it’s quite a bit later, thanks to my recent stint in hospital . But hey, at least that gives me a lot of material to write about. You know, silver linings and all that. The good news first. DropChef has generally been able to keep the level of quality consistent throughout my subscription period. There have been no major blunders, double bookings or any other shenanigans of that sort. The packaging in particular stands out here. It is consistently rock solid, with the cooling pack and the isolation material generally doing an excellent job of keeping the more sensitive ingredients chilled. The quality of the ingredients is equally good, with no major issues with spoil...

In the last few days before I was admitted to hospital , I ran into one of those minor inconveniences that go along with being an office worker in the 21st century. My login password at work was about to expire and I had to reset it. Ah well, what can you do? These regular password changes are part and parcel of work life these days and let’s be honest, they don’t really take that long. Well, that’s what I thought at least. However, due to some unknown error, what should have been a quick and easy chore of less than a minute turned into a multi-hour affair that left me completely logged out of all my work tools on my phone and completely locked out of my work laptop. In the end, it required an intervention from my employer’s IT support team to sort everything and get me productive again. The fact that I stumbled across an undocumented time-out in the process didn’t help either, I suppose,  Now, I obviously won’t go into details here as it effects company security, something that my...

So, I’ve recently been watching a whole lot of interviews with the one and only Stephen Fry. Not sure how the YouTube algorithm got the idea to serve these videos up in my suggestion but hey, I’ll take it! One of the things that has always amazed me about him is just his exquisite an consummate command of the English language. As someone who has dabbled in a bit of writing and blogging, this mastery of language is something that I have always aspired to reach but, let’s face it, will likely be beyond my grasp, especially since I’m not a native English speaker.  It got me thinking though, which is never a good thing. When I was in school, a massive effort was put into ensuring that things like grammar, syntax and the other systemic aspects of language were drilled into me and my fellow students nearly non-stop, whether that was in my native German or later in English. This make sense of course, a language forms a certain framework and you need to get that framework up before you can...

These last few weeks have felt like a return to the days of the great lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 for me, what with me being stuck at home and only heading out for essential stuff like grocery shopping or medical appointments. Unlike with COVID-19, there’s an endgame in sight for my personal lockdown 3.11. It was while sitting around here that I came across an old article idea in one of my OneNote notebooks, one that I must have jotted down in the waning days of the final lockdown given its subject matter. But hey, since all other article ideas have dried up for the moment, why not give it a shot? So, when the hammer came down on Ireland on Friday, March 13th, 2020, a lot of people were left scrambling to convert kitchen tables and other available surfaces to makeshift work desks. Like in so many other countries, work culture in Ireland had traditionally orbited around the company office, and many people had never countenanced working from home. So, whilst some people settled down on t...

Well, that came completely out of the blue. With little warning, I found myself in hospital for only the third time in my life at the tail end of September 2022. It gave me my first real impression of the Irish health service, the people working there, whilst also showing me just how quickly a seemingly normal life can change into something completely different. So, of course, I had to write about that. Hey, what did you expect? I’m still a blogger after all! Okay, so a bit of background information might be helpful here. Back in May 2022, I had a pretty bad fall on a business trip to Munich , Germany. I fell on my right leg, which I managed to twist in the process, next to a few other injuries. This kept me limping for two weeks afterwards, but seemed to heal off pretty well, at least that’s what it looked like from the outside. However, by the end of August, that leg had gotten infected, swelling up to the size of a handball and causing some pretty high fevers along the way. A course...

If you’ve spent as much time on YouTube as I have, that is to say far too much, you’ve likely come across ads or placements for the likes of HelloFresh or DropChef. I certainly have, more than once. These meal kit delivery services are seemingly everywhere since the start of the pandemic. But, given the millions they seem to invest in marketing, are they actually worth the considerable price they’re asking? Well, as I’ll likely be mostly housebound for another couple of weeks, I decided to find out, particularly with regards to DropChef, as HelloFresh is not available here in Ireland. Now, I generally consider myself to be a somewhat decent cook, and I certainly have the waistline to prove it, or is that an event horizon? However, I’ve recently found myself to be in a recipe rut, always cooking the same five to seven recipes, simply because they’re fast. What’s more, they’re not always the healthiest recipes either, to put it mildly. So, I signed up for DropChef , with their regular ...