admittedly this blog post is coming a little late … but hey… better late than never 😉

Snake swimming

During our weekly swim in the lokal lake we encountered a grass snake this Sunday. That snake is living near the water for quite some years now. It can be seen swimming in the summer occasionally. Even when there are people bathing sometimes it is crossing the beach.

The only thing I was surprised about is that it could be seen swimming at this still rather low water temperature of about 11ºC.

BookWyrm update hassle

I tried to update my BookWyrm instance to the latest version (0.7.3 pre-release) this week. This turned out to be a bit more laborious than I thought … Of course there were issues with the pre-release and I had to do a roll-back. The release came with some database migrations (changes to the database schema) that were not backwards compatible. So for the roll-back I had to find the migration information and undo these changes in the database. But then again the migration files of Python Django made this relatively straightforward.

LinkDing now supports Screenshots

Another tool that got an update this week was LinkDing – my bookmark archiving service. The new release now contains an optional container image with the chromium browser engine to take snapshots of the websites you’re adding to your Bookmark archive. This is really neat as the plan of course is to keep this archive around for a long time … likely longer than some of the websites that the links point to.

One can also add more snapshots at a later point in time to the same entry to keep some kind of evolution of the site.

Paperless WorkFlow

Even more software fiddling this week. I’m slightly obsessed with my PaperlessNGX installation now. All my documents go into Paperless meanwhile. Some of them I want to share with other users on my instance. So I created a workflow that adds certain permissions to documents if some conditions are met. In my case the trigger is the correspondent of the new document. If that matches a certain entity, the document is shared with a specific group on my instance.

Wood

Of course we did some more woodworking on the weekend. There were still trees left in the forest for us to fetch. This time it was a little easier as Dad payed a guy with a Forwarder to get us the trees close to the main path. No more hauling the logs with wheelbarrows.

Party Nazis

On Saturday evening we went to a birthday party of one of the locals here. That’s alway fun as one meets whole bunch of people from different backgrounds. Especially different from how we used to live in the big city etc.

I talked to one guy I didn’t know before and he was quite nice. We got along well and talked about where we’re coming from, what we were doing etc. Abruptly the guy asked whether I’d vote for the “DIE GR¨ÜNEN” party. One of the three coalition partners in the current government and the most hated party among the people from the rural area. Hated of course for other reason than the right-wing guys spreading fake narratives about them…

I admitted that most of the times I’d vote for that party. He acknowledged and told me the mandatory story of why he hates the party. Then we switched topics and continued to have a good conversation about all sorts of stuff.

A while later he again asked me – with a little disbelief – whether I’m voting for the “DIE GRÜNEN”. Again I said “yes”. He responded that I surely have noticed by now that he’s on the rather opposite political spectrum. He obviously didn’t like that party, that was obvious. He added that he’d consider himself a Nazi. Blunt straight out. I was a little surprise that he made it that clear. But we still continued to have rather nice and relatable conversations that were by no means Nazi coloured or propaganda. Nobody tried to convince the other of their world view. In fact he emphasised that he enjoyed the conversation and that we got along so well despite our opposite political stance.

Of course some people might now shout: how could you talk to this guy!?

But I believe these kind of conversations and maybe even relationships are very important in keeping the bridge to those people. Showing them that they matter as human and listen to their worries and fears. Building trust and find common ground. So that conversations about the hard topics can take place on a better foundation than mistrust and mutual hate and despise.

Village conversation DIE GRÜNEN

To finish the weekend on a different note this time I stay longer to participate on the village conversation organised by the DIE GRÜNEN Uckermark. Thats a series of talks with the local members of the party but also some higher up staff from the country or even national government on the panel. They briefly introduce themselves to then answer questions asked by the participants. Topics those find relevant and want to ask a party thats member of the government.

It was a small round of about 30 people, but not less interesting and lively.