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#weeklyreview 33/23

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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 .

#ruegenleaks

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 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…

there shouldn’t be that much water leaking out of the hull

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.

#weeklyreview 32/23

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Sunday – Driving to the Baltic Sea

Our yearly family vacation time has arrived. Since about 20 years we‘re spending a week during the summer at the Baltic Sea on Rügen island. That’s the largest German island and a popular place for vacation just laying on the beach.

Looks this year it will be slightly different. The weather is somewhat off this year. It‘s raining heavily and is also quite stormy. Temperature seems to be as low as a 14,5° C during the day.

Usually we‘d be just baking in the sun or slowly cooking in the shade of our beach tent. Apparently not so this year. Weather forecast looks like rain and storm the whole week. Maybe a bit better towards the next weekend.

As a frequent reader you might have already figured that weather doesn’t bother me 🙂 The more weather, the better.

As a first call to action after arrival I got my trusty bright yellow rain jacket out a took a walk on the beach. Lovely weather!

Me being really excited about the weather

Monday – too many people

It’s still raining quite heavily and still stormy. That didn’t stop us from going jogging and swimming this morning. My little tough cookie K3 and I had a nice run on the beach and hopped into the too warm Baltic Sea after that. As the wind had changed direction during the night the beach was now in lee and thus the water was much quieter and save to swim in.

We entertained the idea of finally giving the Ozeaneum in Stralsund a visit. That’s quite a drive from were our apartment is, but due to the weather there wasn’t really anything better we could possibly due over here anyway.

Bad idea as it turned out. Looks like too many people had the same idea. That’s bad enough to get off the peninsula we’re at with many people trying to do the same. But apparently most of them also had the idea to go to Stralsund. I can’t explain otherwise why the city was so crowded. We circled around the Ozeaneum place a few times. But there wasn’t any parking spot closer than at least 2km away. That distance usually wouldn’t stop us. But at heavy rain we considered this too much.

Instead we drove back an payed a visit to Binz to get us some famous “Franzbrötchen” and visited the Seebrücke.

Defective by design

In the recent weeks more and more people wrote about the very bad idea that is Googles “Web Environment Integrity“ (WEI). It’s an attempt by Google to convince websites to query a special API (of course provided by Google) whether the requesting browsing client is OK (according to googles idea of “OK”) to serve.

Greg Farough wrote an in depth article why this is destroying the very idea of an open internet:

Compared to its staggering potential effects, the technical means through which WEI will accomplish its ends is relatively simple. Before serving a web page, a server can ask a third-party “verification” service to make sure that the user’s browsing environment has not been “tampered” with. A translation of the policy’s terminology will help us here: this Google-owned server will be asked to make sure that the browser does not deviate in any way from Google’s accepted browser configuration, precluding any meaningful use of the four freedoms. It is not far-fetched to imagine a future in which sites simply refuse to serve pages to users running free browsers or free operating systems. If WEI isn’t stopped now, that future will come sooner than we think.

Greg Farough – https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/web_environment_integrity_is_an_all_out_attack_on_free_internet

402 – Payment required

ChatGPT bot blocked from scraping my websites as training material. Thanks for the hint and code to Franz.

Wednesday – long walks

First thing in the morning was 6 km jogging barefoot on the beach. As usual, I overdid this slightly as I got some blisters under my feet from running. That wouldn’t be too much of a problem if we hadn’t planned to walk in the beach to the next village for lunch. That was also two times a roughly 5 km walk and didn’t make those blisters smaller.

I guess no more jogging this vacation then.

Thursday- Karls Erdbeerhof

Also a Tradition when we’re here: going to Karl’s Erdbeerhof. That’s a barn/farm style kids amusement park themed around strawberries. They have a large barn building turned into a restaurant, indoor playground and shopping area. They build their own sweets and manufacture them right in front of your eyes. In the outside area are a whole bunch of kids attractions like slides, climbing thingies, petting zoo etc.

I like that as it’s a local brand that has built it’s credibility over several years now. They managed to expand the concept and opened up more of these facilities in the north of Germany and even one close to Berlin. Kids love it their and their stuff is very friendly ( something unheard of in Germany).

Friday – Beach Day

Finally the weather was good enough to spent the day on the beach just chillin as we usually do during this summer vacation.

The Baltic Sea was very calm and I took a little swim straight out from the beach. Just about 200m out and then turned around to get back to the beach. The kind guys from the DLRG (German lifeguards) payed me a visit with their shiny read boat to check whether everything is OK. Apparently I was a little too far out of the formal swimming zone for their taste.

I thanked them for checking and confirmed I’m just happily paddling along back to the beach.

Earlier the day we hiked up the little hill and on top of the pilot tower to take the obligatory pictures from atop over the peninsula.

Saturday – Choo choo

Weather was good enough before lunch for beach. Wind direction has turned a bit so that we had a light breeze from the sea. Took a swim, this time properly with my buoy and parallel to the beach. No visit from the lifeguards 😉

In the afternoon kiddo and me too the traditional steam engine train from Göhren to Binz and back. Always a bit of an adventure for the steam engine nerd. The air was rather smokey and reminded me of the winters in GDR time.

#weeklyreview 31/23

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Sunday – Festung Königstein

On Sunday we had to pick up the kid from its vacation camp in Saxony. Since the place wasn’t too far away from castle “Festung Königstein“, we took a little detour and had a visit.

Been there several times as a kid with my parents on vacation. Now my wife wanted to pay a visit as while we were close by anyway.

I wasn’t sure that it would be doable with the wheelchair of my wife. But we gave it a try.

Turned out it was doable. The hardest part was pushing her the approximately 600m from the parking area to the base of the castle. From there we took the elevator to the top.

On the actual castle it was comparatively easy to push her around. We almost made the whole round and took many pictures. Even had a snack at one of the many eating places.

Overall a really great trip. And again we had been very lucky with the weather. It had apparently rained heavily earlier the day. But when we were atop it was just dramatic clouds but with occasional sunshine. After we left another round of heavy rain set in.

Tuesday

Got rid of a whole bunch of old scraps at the local recycling yard. That’s quite a good service that’s included in our yearly waste treatment fee: one can drop off most of household garbage like old furniture, reasonable amounts of construction material leftovers, electronics etc. for free.

Today I’m feeling the pushing of the wheelchair up the hill on Sunday. Shins and arms are hurting a bit.

Also gave the final signature today to officially decommission our old “Verein”. That closes an era.

Wednesday – Finally Internet

Today the final connection of our new DSL landline in the countryside was activated. A Telekom technician showed up at 8am and mumbled something about wrong house number. In his documents it said just the number. While our house has a number and an additional letter.

Fortunately he was able to connect it nevertheless and measures about 100 Mbit/a DSL line capacity. So far so good.

But our Router didn’t want to connect and he thought that’s a problem with the router or actual internet provider.

Turned out the FritzBox just needed a round of calibration and then everything worked. Yay – finally our own internet connection.

Our neighbors where so kind to share their WiFi with us for the last couple of years. I had quite and adventurous setup to pickup their signal near the fence with a WiFi repeater and feed it into a LAN cable. The cable ends in the shed in an old switch from where it runs further to my trusty container office. And also into a power line adapter to get the signal inside the house. In the house a Powerline WiFi bridge provides us with wireless network.

Several trucks almost ran over the bucket that covered the WiFi Pickup near the fence. The lawnmower had close encounters with the power cable for the WiFi pickup. Also summer, winter and all sorts of insect battle tested that poor WiFi repeater. But it did its job for several years. It will get some rest now.

Took the time before lunch to rearrange and reconfigure the network devices. Almost done.

Now that I’m in control of my own router and firewall I might start hosting stuff from here as well 😉

In the afternoon I built a new bed upstairs. The old sleep sofa had its days and was a torture to get down and out. Now we went with something more simplistic and just build a raised bed from construction wood.

Thursday – rainy day

Today was again a very rainy day for this area and season. I finally cleaned up my rain gauge after I saw a toot from David de Groot

H

After the cleaning the sensor recorded about 6,5l/sqm for the day. It was surely more than that as it rained earlier in the day before the cleaning.

Friday

Got rid of even more old furniture and scraps at the local scrap yard. Of course forgot some bits as well.

The village church hosts some summer concerts. Mostly organ music. While I’m totally not a (traditional) religious person (but ask me about Unix text editors), but when there is an event in the village, you show up. Just to show your appreciation of the effort.

This time an old acquaintance of mine played the organ. He is meanwhile the priest of the church my parents go to. Of course he played some classic from Bach and Händel. But he also played “Über sieben Brücken musst du gehen” from Karat. Which is one of the most famous rock songs of the former GDR.

Saturday – too much driving

In the afternoon I planned to pick up the kid in Berlin for we are driving to the Baltic Sea vacation on Sunday.

My wife felt good enough to join me and pay a visit to our flat in Berlin for the first time in over a year. It went well and nobody was harmed 🤣

On the way back to the countryside, about 2/3 of the way we realized she had forgotten her purse with all her cash and cards. Essential items. So we did a U-turn and drove back again to Berlin 🤷‍♂️

No really looking forward for some vacation at the sea. The weather might be not the best for just laying on the beach. But I can also perfectly lay on the couch and be reading 😉 Just hope the kids will also find something to keep themselves quietly busy and occupied.

#weeklyreview 30/23

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road trip

On Sunday we took a road trip to the north around the “Feldberger Seenlandschaft” and northern .

Unbelievably beautiful landscape. A lot of forests and lakes. Some vast fields in rolling hills.

Quite a few cyclists on the roads, but far from crowded. Of course there are tourist hot spots like Carwitz which are almost bursting of tourists.

#RegEx

Had to write a parser for some config files which don’t seem to adhere to any common standard. That involved fiddling with a lot of regular expressions. Still amazed how powerful they are and bow towards the setting sun to worship the work of Stephen C. Kleene, the inventor of regular expressions and of course Noam Chomsky who formalized the concept of regular languages a little later.

A tool thats very handy for dealing with RegExs is https://regexr.com

The code I’m writing is to automate some tasks on a production system for which we don’t have a test system. It’s a little bit “open heart surgery” and thus requires extra careful handling to not fuck things up for thousands of users. 🙈

Friday – Surprise

On Friday my wife organized a surprise birthday party for me. I usually don’t party at my birthday as in summer most friends are usually on vacation anyway and other reasons.

But this year my wife took the effort to secretly organize a party with our friends from the village. That was really nice and the last guests left at 4am 🙈

We were really lucky with the weather as it was rainy all week and also the forecast for Friday wasn’t that good. But the rain perfectly stopped Friday morning and it was sunny with just a few clouds the whole day and even Saturday until after lunch.

Saturday we took a little slower as we didn’t had much sleep. Cleaned up and consumed left overs and chilled the afternoon when the rain set in.

Got a very cool pouch made by @cole@wandzeitung.xyz filled for colorful nail polish from my besties @stulli@wandzeitung.xyz and @b30@wandzeitung.xyz 🫶

#weeklyreview 29/23

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Monday – long drive

Delivered kiddo to his WWF summer camp to the south of Saxony. Saw a burning truck trailer on our way down. Pretty spectacular. Fortunately the firefighters got it under control before it took over to the nearby forest. On my way back that whole side of the autobahn was blocked for cleanup.

A burning truck trailer on the autobahn

Tuesday – we have a signal

Finally the construction company was there to connect our house to the telephone network. Eventually we’ll get our own DSL line in the . Just a few more weeks until it’s finally working I hope …

technician seals the connected cables to bury them under the road again

Wednesday – car maintenance

The bloody car demands oil check. Next contractual garage is about 50km away. That means loosing half a day with driving and waiting. At least I was able to work during the waiting time. Still annoying.

My password Manager 1Password lost a password. I’m 100% sure it was there last week as I used this item a lot in the last few weeks. Today it’s nowhere to be found. Very mysterious. Opened a support case.

Our painted ceramics arrived from “Paint your style” shop. I like my new shiny cup a lot

Thursday – Forest

maybe we bought a piece of forest

A slice of forest with an almost dried out pond

Saturday – meeting of the locals society

Living in the countryside also means there are more activities with the local community. To say that everyone knows each other would be an exaggeration. But it’s close to that. You know your neighbors and usually have regular chats over the fence. And our local village also has at least two organized communities (Verein) where we’re member of.

Every once in a while there are meeting to discuss the upcoming community projects. Everyone bring some food or beverages to these gatherings and it’s usually a lot of fun. Despite occasional heated discussions

#weeklyreview 28/23

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Sunday – run day and a birthday party

A friend messaged me whether I wanted to run again with him on Sunday. Sure I want. So we gave it a shot and ended up doing 12km before it was unbearable hot.

We took a few breaks as the dog of my friend had to take short baths in the lakes to cool off.

It was good to run a longer distance again. Need to do this more often during the summer vacation. And of course do more regularly swimming again.

In the evening we attended the birthday and anniversary of them being in Berlin for 10 years of some friend of ours. Despite the hot day it was a lovely evening meeting wonderful new people. I’m always amazed when meeting people from all over the world and people which have spent quite some time living and working in other countries.

To me this is always humbling to see that we’re just a tiny little spot on this large planet and that there is much more than Germany or Europe even.

Monday – Hertz Gymnasium Part 1

On Monday K2 had an appointment at the potential new school for his last 2 years. We applied at the Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium, as this is one of the very few schools in Berlin offering computer science as a major course during the Abitur.

While theoretically more schools offer this, in fact only a handful in the whole of Berlin practically do. Because usually there either not enough pupil choosing this topic and/or the school doesn’t have enough staff to actually deliver it.

The head teacher for mathematics and computer science took full 90 mins to have thorough conversion and little exercises with the kid. Now let’s hope he sees enough potential in the kid to accept him for his final years.

Tuesday – hit the gym

After the “long run” on Sunday I went to the office gym with a friend on Tuesday. It was super hot and we only managed to do a few minutes on the cycles and rowing machines.

Did a few strength exercises on the machines with up to 110kg. Gonna field my tits tomorrow..

Later that day I tried out a cool project I saw on Mastodon: BirdnetPi. An software for newer RaspberryPis that analyses audio recordings for birds voices and classifies them. So you can have a record of which birds were heard at what time.

I’ve got it running on an RaspberryPi 3b although the recommended hardware is a RapsberryPi 4. it worked quite ok although the Web Interface was a little slow. It recognizes all the birds that we hear from our balcony and keeps sound samples. So you can listen to the voice and check whether that’s what you would expect in your area.

Unfortunately the little Pi was too weak to process all the sound bites in due time. So the recordings accumulated and the recognized birds were several hours behind. Eventually the SD card filled up and the Pi stopped.

I’m now trying to get this running on an old laptop to install it on the countryside. Over here it should be even more interesting to get a log of those birds.

Wednesday – schools out for summer

This was the last day of the 2022/2023 school year. All kids finished successfully and are now officially in vacation mode.

A box of donuts to celebrate the end of the school year

Friday – Hertz Gymnasium Part 2

On Thursday we received the long awaited email that the kid was accepted at the Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium. On Friday we went there and picked up the paperwork for the new school year starting in August.

This hopefully marks the last leg of quite a school odyssey for him. Hope he’ll enjoy the school as much as it sounds like and he’ll get the input and inspiration he needs.

It will be definitely a tough switch moving in the 11th class. This school has an extended curriculum for the science subjects and he several years behind. But very eager to learn.

Saturday – Horde

The Horde is a local band which plays a wide variety of party music at local festivities live. Their repertoire ranges from heavy metal over punk rock to German Schlager evergreens.

This year is the second time I saw them perform in the nearby village and it was a fun evening again. Good conversations, ok food and drinks. The people (guests and band alike) had a lot of fun despite the hot temperatures.

#weeklyreview 27/23

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Kids had their last full week of their school year. K2 on a class trip to Hamburg and K3 had “project week” with various activities.

On Monday the infamous Beer & Burger crew met. We gave “Five Guys” burger a try. Good burger, but less than stellar ambience. We were so focused on the burgers and complaining about the surroundings that we forgot to take pictures 😉

The drinks afterwards in “Schalander” were good. Nice venue with a beach like sand pit and deck chairs.

night view of Warschauer Straße Berlin

Also in Monday we had the first attempt to get our phone landline connected in our house in the countryside. When we originally built the house we installed a cable for phone and DSL but didn’t connect it to the grid actually. Back the house was meant as a mere vacation home and not having a phone or internet was a feature.

But that we spent more time here our own internet connection seems to be appropriate. Our neighbors were nice enough to let us use their WiFi for many years now. But at some point we wanted to have something ourselves that we also have a little more control over.

Thought it should be pretty easy to install. The cable on the outside comes out of ground near the garden gate fence post. Inside the house it’s hanging out the wall in a small storage room.

But the Telekom technicians eventually said that those two loose ends do not belong to the same cable.

I was slightly puzzled as that was the only cable I knew since a decade laying there. But it turns out that we actually had two cables installed. One for the DSL line and one for the doorbell. The latter hanging off the garden gate pole but not visible inside the house. The phone cable hanging off the wall inside the house but must be buried somewhere near the street at the gardens gate.

So the Telekom technicians had to leave the site unfinished and I had to find that other end and make a new appointment.

Fortunately I took me not too long to find the buried spool of cable we were looking for. Now hoping to get a new appointment with those technicians again soon.

Tuesday in the office I tried another coffee fanciness : Espresso+Tonic Water

Looked weird, tasted weird (as expected) but not enough of the good weird to have it again.

A small Glas of Espresso + Tonic Water

Wednesday I took a trip to the other side of the city to pick up a new recipe from a doctor. Always a bit of a trip. At least gives some nice views over parts of Berlin from the Ringbahn.

View towards Berlin Mitte from Ringbahn crossing a bridge in Treptow

Slowly but surely getting rid of old stuff in the flat. Thursday I gave away an old VHS video tape recorder to a guy apparently still using those.

Kiddo created a funny Simson poster during her project week

Simpson gender swap

#weeklyreview 26/23

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On Monday we had a proper thunderstorm here in Berlin. Of course at a time when kiddo and me had to get somewhere outside. We hoped we started early enough with our bikes to be at the destination without getting too wet … but that was futile. It started to downpour about when we were about 100m from our destination. But it was raining so heavily that these few meters were enough to soak us completely. But it’s just water and it was anyway too hot that day. Fortunately our area didn’t had too much damage. Across the street a branch of a tree came down and touched some parked cars. That wasn’t too bad from what I’ve seen.

On Tuesday however there was again thunderstorm and took out a whole tree. That tree decided to lay down on a power distribution box on the curbs. Our whole apartment block was without power for a few hours. Still not really a tragedy in my eyes. Nobody was hurt from what I could see and just a few parked cars slightly damaged.

reunion

On Thursday I met with a friend I hadn’t seen in more than 24 years. He was my flatmate during my apprenticeship at SIEMENS back in the late 1990s. He’s occasionally working Berlin and now we took the chance to meet over burgers and drinks while he was in Berlin for a few days.

Crazy to meet someone you haven’t seen for such a long time. But it felt a bit like not much time has passed since then. Still the same funny guy.

Charity concert for est Templin

On Saturday my wife got us tickets for a charity concert in Templin. A special orchestra played baroque and classic songs from the archives of the “Joachimthalsche Gymnsasium”. While admittedly that kind of music isn’t my favorite music, I did enjoy the concert very much. The ambience in the old auditorium of that old school was appropriate for the occasion and the musicians performed with a lot of passion, enthusiasm and a very high level of professionallism.

There was a narrator who explained each song and provided historical context. This was really well prepared and delivered and enriched the whole experience.

I didn’t know that this school was more than 350 years old. While originally founded in 1607 in Joachimsthal near Templin, it moved to various locations in Berlin before this ensemble of buildings in Templin were built in 1912 for the school.

There are plans to turn it into a public school again and this concert was raising funds to renovate the clock tower of the school. The area is really beautiful and the buildings will make a wonderful place to learn.

The full concert will be aired in Deutschlandfunk radio station on 27. August 2023 at 21:05 CEST. I can wholeheartedly recommend the session.

#weeklyreview 25/23

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Had a few conversations with ex-colleagues about company culture and challenges we face in our special domain of knowledge work. Also Kris posted a collection of thoughts he had shared on Mastodon on his blog about the current wave in resignations we see in management of tech companies.

Project Finalization

This week we made the final cut-over on the migration project I’m working on for the last 6 month. Feels good to finally finishing this thing off.

But of course the work isn’t over yet. There is quite a bit of aftermath that we’ll have to take care of. And there are side projects that have been neglected which will need attention now. There is definitely no shortage of work.

I enjoy working directly with people and solving their problems again in this project. They also seem to appreciate talking to a real person who knows about the stuff and not just conversing with a ticket system.

Of course we’re using tickets to track the work as well. But also engage with the people directly via Chat and Meetings to talk about their problem and how we can solve this. This in person communication leads to results much faster for both parties. Because often times its really just a matter of getting on the same page and understanding the problem. The classical tale of: once you explain your problem to the admin it solves itself 😉

Another observation I made is, that people don’t take the time to think about their problem. Something doesn’t work and they jump to a support channel and blur out: “X is not working, can you help?”

How am I supposed to help here? There is no useful information provided on what the person was trying to do in the first place, nor what error message they might have gotten etc.

It takes a few rounds of questions to figure out the person is using either the wrong system or the right system in a wrong way.

But then you also have to experienced engineer which will prepare their question in the most helpful way. They did their homework by double checking they are using the correct system (providing information about this), provide detailed log messages of their problem, naming exact times including timezones and sometimes even provide further information in a machine readable format for further processing.

My point is: it’s a pleasure to work with professionals. And user support is rather time consuming because the average user can’t be bothered to read even the most simple documentation..

No Hello

The page nohello.net summarise a common digital communication problem. I’m really just ghosting people which start conversations like that. Get to the point!

It really boils down to be mindful about people’s time. If you want something from someone else, help them to help you by providing the information they need to fulfil your request. Don’t waste their time with chatter. Do you homework by checking whatever your can upfront and provide the information in an easily consumable format.

Put yourself in their shoes: would you be able and willing to work with the request you just received?

Long table public Dinner

On Saturday we had our 2nd long table public dinner. This is where the people from the village meet at the central place in front of the church and have dinner together. Everyone brings some food to share and their own tablecloth, plates and drinks. This is low effort to organize but really delicious and fun.

We had really good food and plenty thereof. I love the variety and the ideas people come up with. Of course we had interesting conversations and fun as well. Really looking forward for this event next year.

Random Pics from the week

before streaming
iced espresso
japanese food
3D printing again
rainbow coating

#weeklyreview 24/23

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What a week … my work project is in its final phase of hopefully successful completion. But it’s taking a few over hours to push it over the finish line. Not because I’m forced to, but because I like the technical challenges and also working with people and solve their problems.

I also get to write some Python code again. Not that I’m good at it. But I love automating tedious tasks with code. Thats what computers were made for – take over jobs that can be automated, so you’re free to do stuff that the computer can’t do.

Lunch break

spontaneous in-person lunch with @moellus on Wednesday. Forgot to take picture as the distracted me with conversation (I know, quite unusual for him)

K2 odyssee

K2 got an invite to the university of Saarbrücken and the Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science to attend the “Forschungstage Informatik”. This was his first (almost) solo trip by train across the country. The journey to Saarbrücken went, apart from a hour delay on the last leg, OK. The event itself was apparently quite interesting for him. Finally meeting a bunch of likeminded nerds to converse about math and computer science problems….

The journey back but gave him the full dose of german railway incompetence. The first train had to stop at a rather rural train station as the way ahead was blocked by some accident. So they (fortunately there was another kid from Berlin that attended the same event and was traveling together with K2) had to find and alternative route. Since trains were not operating anymore on this station, they had to take a bus to the next bigger city. There they tried to catch the next train to Mainz and Frankfurt/Main. But of course these trains were overloaded and delayed as well. Getting much too late into Frankfurt that evening, there was no fast train going to Berlin anymore. Instead they were parked with an overcrowded train a bit outside Frankfurt for half the night. Just to get back into Frankfurt very early morning and then try to head east towards Berlin. But of course that route didn’t go smooth either. Train had issues and got cancelled to continue to Berlin in Leipzig. Another change. Eventually after almost 24hrs he safely arrive at home.

Reunion

On Thursday evening two ex-colleagues had organised a reunion of our teams at Nokia/HERE in a beer garden. It was quite a large turn up and heartfelt meeting with all the good friends we made over the last almost 20 years.

It was really nice to see all those folks again and chat about the good old times. I’m tempted to say this was one of the most competent and powerful teams I’ve met in my professional career. And the other folks seem to agree as well, now that they have moved on to other companies. Many realise that despite the complaints we had back in days together as a team, we were rather advanced and at the forefront of technology and witchcraft. In their new companies they stepped back several years and have to start all over again to convince people about certain technology and ways of working advantages.

Roofing ceremony

On Saturday our neighbours invited us to the roofing ceremony of their barn building. That was lovely and funny. Their property is like a fairytale garden with so much stuff laying around and being collected and arranged. Chicken pens and gardens, wood carvings, playgrounds, herbs and flowers etc.

One native guy got drunk and excited about a new drink he “invented”. Eventually he had too much of it and we had to carry him home. As he’s in his 70s already, we wanted to make sure he makes it back safely to his bad although it was just across the street.

Random Pictures