I agree. I was forced to hitch-hike in Guatemala after missing the last bus . I also was picked up by a family
and sat in the back of their truck for about 100km. When I got off at 9pm they advised to only continue to hitch on mining trucks or oil tankers during the night. I still remember sitting under a huge banana leaf during torrential rain waiting for hours for a truck to stop. The driver later dropped me off in the middle of no where and said a bus would stop there by 5.30am and indeed it did stop, but it was full so I was sitting on the roof of the bus for the next three hours together with 10 other souls.
In a bus traveling south of Mazatlan I met a family and they invited me to stay at their home in Mexico City. This place, as it turned out, was right in the middle of the largest slum and consisted of a metal frame with roofing and side walls made of tarpauline and a mud floor . The first few days there was a queue of people outside just to oogle the foreigner, but it was all good with lots of smiles. The morning teeth brushing and face washing ritual by young and old was fascinating to watch, with everyone awaiting their turn at the single faucet for hundreds of people.Food was simple, mostly made on small kerosene stoves. I stayed for 8 days and at no time did I feel unsafe , despite my host explaining about many pickpockets , expert thieves and robbers living in this area who went to work the tourist spots during the day , like other people would go to an office , but this was home.
My host had a real job in the forestry department of the city government , but he said he could not afford to live
else where.
Professional thieves are professional enough to not waste time on the foreigner that was probably broke since you were staying in their neighborhood. And professional thieves need a level of anonymity to work, which goes out the door when they rob someone in front of their aunt.
Depends where you live , there is no local farmer's market here, if we drive there the affordable part of the equation disappears. Some local grown things are available , like mushrooms and they seem to be in season all year. The best and freshest tomatoes have flown a minimum of 10 hours from where they happen to be in season. So , while I agree with your proper flow , the reality is you eat whatever is available near you nevermind where it comes from.
... and in the future you will look to this experience as having been VIP, because in the future you will check-in naked , shackled to the floor with a hole in it so that you do not do anything untoward to others and the robot crew. The hole is to avoid the constant toilet trips necessitated by the crappy food . If you travel cattle-class you will get your cloth back in a basket , mixed together with the cloth
of similar classed passengers. You will be allowed to re-dress once getting thru airport security , which involves getting taken apart and put together again by the intern of the day.
While not quite on topic, let me second that Firebird is a fine and under-appreciated RDBMS. Though it can obviously be used to run on your own server, it really shines when it's deployed in the field. It's used for desktop software I help maintain, running at several hundreds of small businesses. The install is super lightweight, requires very little configuration and practically zero maintenance. Firebird strikes a nice balance when it comes to features. What's great is that it can be used with or without a server process. That way you can start using it like SQLite and scale up to a more PostgreSQL-like setup, or go the other way, with no effort. Many years later, we're still very satisfied with our choice at the time.
I used InterBase (Firebird predecessor) 15 years ago, and recall it had some big limits around versioning/lots of updates. To reclaim disk space we’d have to periodically backup/restore the db. It got so bad/frequent that we moved to Postgres and haven’t looked back since. I guess if one is considering SQLite that it’s not too relevant, but is this still an issue with modern Firebird?
Many of IB's limitations and bugs have been removed over the years. I think it was around FB2.5 that it really became a better product than IB ever was. A cool thing, though, is that it's very backward compatible. If you have applications that expect IB6, they will happily connect to any version of FB, even using the old client lib. The pace of development has ramped up since FB3, which was focused on rearchitecting the core. That's mostly a good thing. Still, I fear a little that it will also affect reliability.
Not sure exactly what kind of situation got you in trouble, but I haven't had any issues (ab)using the database myself. Disk space is still not reclaimed. It does, however, get used when the amount of data grows again, of course. Effectively the database is always the largest size it ever needed to be, but no larger. Most of the time, that shouldn't be any issue. If you expect huge spikes, there are other ways around it.
With travel time that long , you have to consider technological advancement at home. Just imagine that you look out of your window after travelling for 70 years and there is this other ship overtaking yours with ease.
When I finished engineering school the prof said :
"The most important knowledge imparted to you here is how to look things up, how to verify your thoughts and get inspiration for new ones to make products faster , better and more efficient."
That was at a time when the latest slide-rule model was state of the art in calculatory equipment. So, yes, do google something before you reinvent the wheel .
