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.

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.

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.

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

Oh, magic week number 23/23

Last weekend I attempted my normal swimming distance on the local lake. The lake is small, about 250 m – 300 m in diameter, and got 3 beaches. My usual track is to start at one beach and swim a triangle across the other two beaches. The total distance is usually around 800 m due to some drift etc.

During the winter swimming the distance is too much for me to cover in freestyle. And since I didn’t manage to go to indoor pools for longer distance training over the winter, I lost my condition to some extend and have to build it again.

But on the weekend I managed to cover the full distance two days in a row at around 22 minutes. Getting back into it feels great.

I’m swimming longer distances with these swim pads on the hands. They keep my hands relaxed as I otherwise tend to get cramps in the hands on longer distances.

The work week was rather busy. Monday we had a „surprise“ doctors visit with the kid. Surprise only in that way that we messed up our calendar almost forgot about this appointment which we had waited for for almost half a year.

Did quite some overhours this week as the migration project I‘m working on is in its final phase. Unraveling technical challenges and dealing with users finally waking up to do the needed changes on their side despite several weeks of notifications and announcement about the upcoming changes. As our company has office around the world, there is always someone awake and pinging me with question.

Also experiencing they „joy“ of outsourcing and different levels of competence. Some services affected by the migration are outsourced to a large service provider with their main workforce in India. They are supposed to operate those services on our behalf. Many of them really have no clue what they are doing there. They neither know the service, nor the basics of operations or network. They just follow instructions and some short notes someone provided. There is absolutely no sense of ownership or understanding for the systems. If just a single character in their notes deviates from what they find on the systems, they throw their hands up and can’t figure out how to continue.

I‘m not blaming the individuals. They are all friendly and try to work with the conditions they find and they hired for. This is some dudes renting bodies for cheap to other companies that don‘t want to have people on their payroll. It is super inefficient and I can‘t imagine that it is cheaper then doing this yourself with competent people.

But the situation reminds me a little to what Reed Hastings wrote in his book about Netflix hiring and operations strategy. In knowledge work (and I consider the majority of IT work as knowledge work) the difference between an average person and a good person is orders of magnitudes larger than in other professions. A really good engineer will do the work of not just 2 or 3 average engineers, no they might be able to replace 10 or 20 average engineers. But companies usually have a hard time admitting that.

And you also need to make sure that those high potential engineers are working on the proper problems. Of course you can keep them busy with mundane tasks like creating PowerPoints and filling out reports. But maybe thats not the best use of their powers.

WMDEDGT

On Tuesday I tried what my friend Assbach does on a more regular basis and captured what I did the whole day as a blog post. Apparently there is a whole #wmdedgt community.

But of course I did it slightly wrong as there are apparently rules for #wmdedgt (of course there are rules, this is Germany. There are rules for everything). Somehow the day for #wmdedgt is the 5th of every month.

Well ….

Pizza steel

This week i finally got myself a pizza steel. That’s an 8mm think slate of steel to put in the oven for making pizzas and other dough things like bread and rolls.

The tip came from my friend Ali who doesn‘t mess around with stuff but always takes serious science based approach. He of course had lot of evidence that steel just has the better heat capacity and transmission features to produce the proper crust etc.

Steel also has the advantage that you can heat it up really high and it’s almost indestructible with your normal kitchen equipment. You don‘t need to worry about it when using a knife or other sharp tools. But it’s rather heavy, you wanna watch to not drop that somewhere. It will for sure damage your floor and limbs.

Will take it to a test drive on the Weber grill on the weekend.

Random Pictures