Sunday
Last day at the Baltic Sea. This time we really stayed until the last day. Sometimes we skip the last night just to drive back home during the night when the roads are empty. Occasionally I like that better than getting up earlier on the last day, pack and leave in time. That days is anyway lost as a vacation day then. Rather be home earlier and have a full day to recover from the drive.
But not this time. Weather was good and we hit the road around 09:30am back to our house in the #uckermark.
Monday
Only on Monday I realised that I actually still had vacation. Was almost prepared to start into the work week again after two weeks of vacation. But this Monday we took the chance to do a little road trip in the #uckermark and meet some friends.
First stop was the “Naturseifen Manufaktur Uckermark” of Anke Thoma. The owner is a long time friend of my wife and they both were rather excited to meet again after a long time of not seeing each other. The shop but first and foremost her products are really beautiful.
After meeting another friend just around the corner from the soap shop we went on to Prenzlau for a special lunch. Special for us, as we used to go to that asian restaurant decades ago. They have an all-you-can-eat buffet for lunch and it is as dodgy as you imagine. But still we like it every once in a while. Also, because this was the first time in more than 5 years that my wife attended a restaurant visit and had a dish actually.
She even felt strong enough to give the St. Marien church in Prenzlau a visit. That church is special as it’s still being refurbished. It was almost completely demolished during the WW2 and not rebuild really during GDR time. The two massive towers are already accessible for a climb and beautiful view over Prenzlau.
Of course there was a dude atop complaining about the sight of wind turbines on the horizon.
Tuesday – new MacBook
After 6 years of using my trusty MacBook Pro I thought its about time to get a new one. The old one got slow to a point it was annoying. On Tuesday the new device could finally be picked up from local IT in the office. Took a short trip there and picked up the device. Apparently two weeks of vacation were long enough for me to forget my account password. I locked my account by repeatedly typing in the wrong password. I guess that means the vacation were effective.
The new device is a MacBook Pro 14 inch with the M2 Max CPU and 64GB RAM. I already fanboyed hard on Mastodon about this device. It’s so incredibly fast …. this must be alien technology.
I witnessed the jump in performance of adding more RAM to a machine and then the switch from HDDs to SSD. But this new CPU architecture seems to be another level. Everything is so snappy, you don’t even see the app icon jump in the Dock. The apps just open.
I immediately created two virtual machines using UTM to test performance of virtualisation. Both VMs were using the ARM CPU and got 4 CPU cores and 12GB RAM.
Each of these VMs (one macOS, one Debian Linux) were faster than my old laptop. And they bother ran in parallel while the main OS was still snappy.
And now the best part. I get over a whole work day with one battery charge. Even when running these VMs in parallel and have my 2 browser with many tabs open. This is just crazy magic.
Am I drooling again?
The keyboard got a physical ESC key eventually and feels rather solid.
Wednesday
spend the whole day playing with the new macBook. Still in total awe about the performance. Had to switch the Linux VM to an x86_64 arch though as some essential proprietary packages were not available for ARM.
Thursday
We tried to bring the sailboat of my in-laws into the water. Turns out the wooden planks have dried out too much over winter and the boat would just have sunk if we had just pushed it off the trailer. Lessons learned…
Friday
We had a nice party in the evening with some friends from around the villages. Just a small gathering this time, but all the more intense and interesting conversations.
Saturday – AnnenMayKantereit
Saturday evening our two boys and I attended the #AnnenMayKantereit concert in Berlin. It took place in the Parkbühne Wuhlheide and was just wonderful. They’re easily the best band in Germany right now. Everything was well prepared and although we had to wait for quite some time for the band to appear, there was enough catering in the Parkbühne with lots of drinks and food etc.
The concert itself of course was awesome. They just take their thing very serious and give their best and enjoy themselves and the audience. So much that even early on in the concert you could feel something like “standing ovations” to the band. I mean we were standing from the moment they entered the stage anyway because the dudes in front of us stood up… But they really engaged and amazed the crowed. Have rarely seen this with a German audience.
