I'm not sure what mine is. I feel it's easier for me to find products that let me down in some way than ones that never do despite prolonged use.

Despite its limitations, I really liked the Nintendo 64. For its time it was capable of things that were really exciting to me. Of course, it was easier to excite me back then, anyway. These days I really like my keyboard, the Turtle Beach Impact 500. It's really sturdy, has the Cherry Blue switches whose tactile feedback I enjoy, and I've just had no problems with it whatsoever in the one year and a couple of months that I've been using it. It has no numpad, but that hasn't bothered me. I type a lot, so this is one of my most used products and definitely my favorite keyboard I've ever had. It does lack one thing, which is a feature to automatically inspire me whenever I'm staring at a blank page in my word processor with nothing to say. That's less of a problem than when I decided to start writing more over a year ago, but it'll still happen sometimes.

I like Blair's Death Rain habanero potato chips. They are scarcely available here, and the manufacturer has some issues making them or shipping them out from time to time, but I love how hot and yet tasty they are. Usually when I have them, though, I'm somewhat painfully reminded of that fact the next morning.

I have a favorite shirt. It's a checkered red and black shirt with long sleeves and a collar. I can't remember what brand it is, in fact it might be a generic store brand. I wear it over a t-shirt. It looks pretty nice and could well be my favorite shirt that I've ever had. I hope it wasn't made by children or enslaved adults. That might be too much to hope for, I don't know.

I wish I could say I had a favorite car that I've owned, like a lot of you might, but I've never even had a driver's license. Everyone tells me driving is really easy, but people just aren't that good at driving, so I hope the automated car revolution comes soon.

The French Onion soup from the Fairview restaurant, at Chateau Lake Louise in Banff, Alberta. When offered. It is table d'hote. The flavor is perfectly French Onion. The bread perfectly soaks up the soup without turning to mush, but is still soft enough that you can spoon it apart. The cheese is thick and well browned, but not so much that a spoon can't pass through it. It is a very good French Onion soup.

I also like Cheddar and Jalapeño Doritos, just in case anybody thought I had a sophisticated palate.

There are a lot of other products that I enjoy a lot, too. None of them are tech - software and computers are universally garbage - but when you look carefully, you can see how much hard work and amazing skill goes into all of the boring everyday things. Those are the products I like most.

But, man, that was a great soup.

TWSBI Eco with extra fine nib- relatively large capacity fountain pen that writes really well. It's not a fancy fountain pen, and many people complain about TWSBI pens breaking easily, but I've not had that experience.

Pilot V5s are top-tier rollerball pens that are cheap and practically disposable, but write better than anything comparably priced in my experience. If I didn't have fountain pens now I'd still be on V5s.

In a similar vein, Rhodia Staplebound pads, especially the dotpads. Really smooth paper, ink doesn't bleed, love these. Too pad they're expensive, so I usually end up using a clipboard with copy paper.

I'll probably catch some flak for this, but I really like Sublime Text. I like the aesthetic of the editor, plugins are easy to work with, and there are some plugins that I really have grown to rely on (e.g. PlainTasks for todo lists and notes). I mostly do light programming in Python, some C++, and a lot of LaTeX, and it does two of those three really well on Windows.

American Apparel used to make really awesome t-shirts in size medium that fit me perfectly. I own three shirts printed on American Apparel t's and they're my favorite shirts; unfortunately they're basically 5 years old (woah, I feel old) and getting holes in them. Newer medium t-shirts from American apparel are baggier and don't seem to shrink up to the right size after washing.

Now I'm just angry that I've never seen these

My real doll.

I can sex for a month with Girder-brand Urethral Splints.

I really loved my father's (then my brother's, then mine, then my brother's again) Audi A6 from some time in the 90s. Everything in this car felt right. The gas pedal had this slight resistance which enabled you to push it to exactly the right position. But if you were bored of the pedal you could just enable the cruise control. The brakes never braked too much or too little. But who wants to break if you can drive at a leisurely 200 km/h on the Autobahn with ease. And the cassette player had many good cassettes from my childhood which we used to hear when we were on holiday. The trunk could hold more than some wagons nowadays. It was just the perfect car and I miss it dearly. Unforetunately it passed away a few years ago when it became too expensive to maintain.

I wear a Casio F-91W as a sports/running watch or if I'm out in the field. I put it on a nato watch strap, and the thing has been going on for years. I like it because it tells me the time (shocking I know) and it's been a sturdy little device. I found out after I bought it that this particular Casio watch is a favorite of both try-hard hipsters and seasoned terrorists.

I wouldn't go so far to buy the Casio watch that's also a wrist calculator because it's a safety issue; I'm might die drowning in pussy.

I'm loving this third phase of ECHOMAN, btw.

I genuinely enjoy driving my Isuzu (off-road). I also have an old (1960s) craftsman hand drill that refuses to die that I like using. I have an excellent Swiss K31 rifle that is a work of art and really knocks down the deer.

I think the product I love the most, however, is either my Triumph motorcycle or my Double H Roper cowboy boots.

I am also incredibly fond of David sunflower seeds.

can't really pick one thing of all the things... but i'll throw a few gems

Buck 110, a classic, knife snobs will scoff because it's not a fancy assisted opening EDC knife costing $200+ but it's older than i am and does it's job very well

Matco BFR118TG thin profile, very smooth ratcheting action, longer handle with a comfort grip that fits really well in my hand (in fact the whole Matco/Armstron 88 tooth ratchet line is a winner)

Sennheiser HD580, had them for almost 10 years, they were used when i bought them, i've replaced the cable years ago and the foam pads a little more recently and they are still going strong

Streamlight Stylus Pro, easily fits in my shirt pocket and more than bright enough for it's purpose (usually finding that stupid screw i dropped in an engine bay)

Rapala Original Floating Minnow specifically the F-9 model in gold... i've done so well over the years with that lure i was absolutely crushed when a gust of wind blew it into a tree... the gold color is surprisingly hard to find locally, i made sure to buy 2 when i replaced it

Bomber Bill Dance signature series Fat A... another lure i do very well with, discontinued model, i will probably cry if i ever lose it

Vernor's... recently was introduced to this liquid awesome... it was truly a "where has this been all my life" moment

the vintage coleman metal coolers... we had one when i was a kid and that thing would hold ice better than what a yeti could hope for... the ones they make now are a sad joke in comparison

Oh yeah, I forgot about my AKG K271 MKIIs. Had them for about 7 years now, still going strong. Only the channel indicator plastic parts have fallen off and there's some, uh, sweatwear on the "headband", tho'

Whereas only after mere 4 years of usage, my Sennheiser HD280 Pros had become some kind of a ziptie-duct tape-sock monstrosity. In fact, they already started breaking down noticeably within 6 months. Yet I only threw them out last month (not that I had used them as headphones in 7 years, but still).

Oh, and they never had the sound isolation I was told they'd have. The MKIIs are light years ahead of them even in that regard.

(Oddly enough, everyone else seems to have nothing but praise for the HD280 Pros. Hmph.)

Springer math textbooks, they're cheap and good quality in every regard, plus I can get unrestricted PDFs for free from the UC library system, 10/10 will be customer for as long as they're this way.

I know I'm throwing the question out there, but any good coffee related products? I'm tired of dying percolators, and I probably should stop using percs.

My desk. I bought it when Massassi was young. From a thrift store for $30. Kiramin got one at the time, too, but I think he got rid of his. I used to think this was solid oak but it's just fat particle board covered with oak veneer. It's so damn sturdy I think it could hold the weight of my truck.

Seconded, UTM and GTM tend to be top notch. I think I've only read one bad one, but I don't even remember what it was about anymore. Someday I hope I'll have time to finish GTM Algebraic Geometry.

I switched to French press, haven't looked back since.

Is that Hartshorne? I'm very much considering algebraic geometry for graduate school

You and everyone else.

But yes, Hartshorne's GTM Algebraic Geometry is (was?) the standard text. I've been told it's the first thing everyone studies in mathematics graduate school.

I've been hearing that, algebraic geometry is really that oversaturated?

Algebraic geometry is a useful tool for formulating problems, regardless of whether or not you want to pursue it for its own sake.

As for reading Hartshorne right after enrolling, I suppose that depends on how confident you already are about passing your algebra and analysis qualifying exams. I think Lang's (graduate text) for algebra (complemented by George Bergman's notes) and Folland (or the book by Bass, which was written expressly for the purpose of passing qualifying exams) for analysis might be better first books.

Gun

I checked a copy out from the library, I just wanted to get a heuristic understanding of a couple proofs.

Hartshorne is probably not the best place to get motivation for the subject (which is definitely not about proofs). It is known for being dry and unmotivated, although brilliant and possibly indispensable.

There are other very qualified authors who are much more mindful of their reader's needs than Hartshorne (at least to my knowledge, which is admittedly based on hearsay and not direct experience). I've heard excellent things about David Mumford's books, for example.

I switched to cold brew a while ago when I bought a little Hario jug for making it, or just use an Aeropress if I've forgotten to stick it in the fridge the night before. I tend to find they're both less acidic than French press, though that makes the cold brew seem deceptively weak when it is in fact rocket fuel.

Looks like the library has an intro book by him, I'll check that out next time I go.

If you really do want to learn algebraic geometry, you should probably know a bit about topology (an undergrad course in point set topology would probably suffice, a course in real analysis maybe not quite), and have taken a sequence in abstract algebra.

I'm not so sure Mumford has books that are up to date for undergraduates. The classic book by Mumford is The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes, but you need to have the following understood first, as a prerequisite:



If this looks beyond you at this point, perhaps rather than proceeding like a typical undergraduate subject (which I'd say algebraic geometry is not, and although there are books which try to translate the techniques of the subject into elementary language, I'm not sure I see the value in this), you would do better to read a more discursive and less rigorous book about the subject.

There is a great book by an algebraic geometry named Miles Reid (!). The book doesn't talk down to the reader or dumb things down, but is nevertheless pitched at undergrads, and the consequence of this is that you get to learn about all the things you don't know in a chatty and informal way, but should learn more about, interspersed with valuable commentary (uncharacteristic of most math books!). The book is appropriately called Undergraduate Algebraic Geometry.

Then you can try to read the Red Book by Mumford, or maybe one of Eisenbud's books that are often used as preludes to Hartshorne (the two I'm thinking of are Commutative Algebra: With a View Toward Algebraic Geometry, and The Geometry of Schemes).

To understand Reid's book, you still need algebra:

Yeah, but who doesn't already know that stuff?

I found UTM General Topology by Dixmier to be a light read. I don't know if it's sufficient for algebraic geometry, but it was certainly enough to help formalize some basic concepts of convex geometry.

Any American undergraduate math major who hasn't taken algebra or number theory. :-/

you can major in math without field theory, ring theory, and topology? wtf

I do think the things in Reid's preface would be straightforward enough for Reid to pick up, though.

I don't think Reid has graduated yet.

Next you'll be telling me that you can get a math undergrad without taking a proof course.

I said undergraduate math major, not undergraduate math graduate. In the U.S. students take algebra in their junior or senior year.

To be clear, which algebra are we talking about? At my alma mater, there were remedial algebra courses (college algebra, precalc), and the normal 3-course stream of introductory linear algebra which was entirely computational. Field theory, ring theory, etc. were named more specifically, so when you talk about a course like "algebra" it is extremely vague sounding to me. Algebra is a technique, and there are a lot of ways you can use and teach it.

Honors linear algebra and real analysis covered all of the prerequisites rigorously by mid first year, non-honors students wouldn't have seen a proof until second or third, and field theory or topology until late third or fourth year. All much too late IMO. But still mandatory for math majors. And still better than non-honors/non-math students, who never saw any of it.

Fleshlight.

this one:


which would cover the topics listed in "Algebra" and "Galois Theory" from the image I posted from Reid's book.

If a US student takes calculus in high school, they can get started on analysis and honors linear algebra their freshman year, do topology their sophomore year, and then algebra (groups, rings, fields, representation theory) their junior year.

I've covered both general topology and algebra through Galois theory

Ah, okay. I think you'll be fine giving Mumford's Red Book a shot, but I confess I don't speak from experience and I don't want to mislead you. You could also start looking at some grad level algebra books, such as Lang (with Bergman's notes), or Aluffi, or even audit a grad level algebra course.