Started the year with an unexpected long NYE party. We hadn’t planned anything spectacular for NYE and just visited the church in Templin for the fireworks. Coming back home the neighbours had their party going and we went over with a bottle of sparkling wine to wish each other a good new year. That of course escalated quickly and we stayed until 05:00 am – ignoring my running appointment at 09:30am.

So with just a little bit of sleep I started the new year running. That went much better than I expected given the circumstances.

I skipped the new years swimming as I was running already with just 3 hours of sleep. And it was raining the whole day.

Tuesday we took a trip to Neubrandenburg. A city that I visited quite a lot as a kid. Actually – not the city so much, but rather the sports school facilities near the Tollense Lake.

First time I have been in the city centre in fact. And boy … this city really needs you to be a hardcore GDR fan. It looks like all buildings outside the historic inner city core are built from GDR plate tectonics concrete. The whole city seems to be made in Minecraft. Everything is cubic and apparently from GDR time.

Back then the approach was probably of rather practical nature. Provide affordable living space and social infrastructure. All the apartment buildings were also supplied with little shops and child care centres. But still… rather not so pleasing for the eye nowadays.

The worst building in the city centre was actually the high-rise from the Nordkurier. The dominant local newspaper that has a tendency to spread right-wing fake news and conspiracy shit.

Maybe I know why that is… look what they turned the “house of art and education” into:

On the upside … I found snack garlic 🙂

Last three working days of the week I already had to work again. Fortunately is was relatively quite as most of the colleagues still had the week off.

So I had a little bit of spare time to finally fix my InfluxDB server. I set the data retention policy to indefinitely on the original setup and of course after about 5 years the disk eventually filled up. This can’t be changed after the initial setup… so I just created a fresh setup. The data wasn’t very valuable anyway. This time I configured a year of retention and now have some days to read up on the aggregation functions …

Watched the second seasons of Loki on Disney+. Hated the fact that despite the payed subscription I’m getting to see advertisement. The series itself was rather “meh”, now that the time travel thing isn’t new anymore. The actors gave their best and are lovely. But overall not as good as the first season.

And of course we finished the week off with swimming. The night had a low of about -5º C and there was a rather thin layer if ice on the lake shore. But that didn’t stop us. I prevented us from swimming for more than 2 minutes … but it didn’t stop us 😉