What I Use: Mexico City (October 2023) (Premium)

Our third and final trip to Mexico City this year unfolded much like our previous two, in March and July, where we just lived like locals, worked each day, and did just a bit of sightseeing. This is by design: Our goal is to spend more time here each year---fewer but longer trips---and eventually split out time between our apartment in Roma Norte and someplace in the U.S. So far so good.

But I also had some specific work-related goals for this trip. And perhaps that's a good place to start, since I did pretty well on my to-do list but didn't quite accomplish everything that I'd hoped.

What I finished, what I did not finish
Let me start with the biggest defeat: Between our July and August trips to Mexico City, I engaged in a whirlwind digital decluttering initiative that saw a lot of success but also a few setbacks. Coming into this trip, I had hoped to rectify my separate Google Photos and OneDrive photo collections, finish organizing and archiving my remaining photo scans, and publish the remainder of my Microsoft-related videos to the Thurrott.com YouTube channel.

And while I did, in fact, finish that latter task, the other two remain incomplete.

Irritatingly, I did a lot of work on the photo collection consolidation bit here but still came up empty. I even wrote almost 3,000 words on the topic as I went, but never published it because it would read as gibberish: All I did was make some progress in certain directions but not actually achieve what I wanted to achieve. So I am pushing that project---and the scans, which I barely looked at here---forward to the post-trip future.

My other work was more successful.

I also wanted to complete two major hardware reviews, for the iPhone 15 Pro Max and HP Spectre Folding PC. And I completed those, although each was longer than expected, and thus took longer to finish than expected. But that's OK. I appreciate the mostly positive feedback on both, to date, and would like to think I'm making some kind of contribution with each. Now, I am looking forward to testing the Pixel 8 Pro (and, to a lesser degree, the Pixel Watch) when I get home, but there are also some iPhone-related topics that perhaps deserve some post-review attention. It's impossible to get to everything, but we'll see.

Finally, I had also hoped to publish an initial 23H2 update for the Windows 11 Field Guide during this trip, while not knowing at the time what the actual schedule for that release would be or how I would update the ebook and web versions of the book in turn. In the end, I decided to publish the new chapters in batches to the site first and then bulk update the book with some amount of 23H2 content on or before Microsoft released 23H2. And I succeeded even though Microsoft released 23H2 weeks earlier than I expected. So that was nice, and I have several other edited chapters in progress now. I'll publish new chapters one at a time in each location going forward.

(The schedule f...