log.

Still trying to gain routine here, browsing through notes made all along the way. Another week went by, Friday afternoon is for all sorts of bookkeeping, including, but not limited to what piled up the last seven days. Noteworthy tidbits to report:

• Visited family for the weekend. Went on a city trip to Leipzig. Had an afternoon coffee at Café Luise. Experienced the vibrant mood while at the same time being slightly confused and turned-down by the ever-increasing gentrification in parts of the city, and also a very special kind of tourists one doesn't really want to run into every other moment. Felt how much then and now I miss the mood of Wave Gotik Treffen - and feel the desire to wear skirt and boots. Maybe there's a lot of nostalgia in all that. 
• Spent four days of the week in office office, just one in home office. Finished remodeling the interior and layout and making it feel comfortable as could be. It's an interesting change in environment and mood while at the same time tried to force myself to get my home office into a better shape too. At some point there's to be seen days are limited in hours and there's only so much to be done in these.
• Did an internal developer training for a small crowd of customers and an internal colleague. Worked out, again, despite a massive wave of imposter syndrome incoming before, as it always happened by now and probably always will. It always takes a while to get from a classroom explanation setup to a more casual workshop conversation mode. 
• Moved forth a particularly critical customer project, thankful for having a few hours of unexpected unplanned time available to be spent on that due to canceled meetings. In between infrastructure woes, basic software installation, writing code to extend certain parts of the application and tweaking a system to use a local Mistral NeMo language model, there are lots of odds and ends and lots of aspects that might be relevant to discover and to dig into much deeper. At some point I felt grateful for being a generalist, someone who knows just enough to understand a lot of different technical domains, but sometimes this feels unsatisfying because it prevents one from being really good at anything. Too, multi-tasking does seem to make things worse by shortening attention span and optimizing oneself for easily switching between a plethora of things at the same time and sometimes somehow I feel a cautious desire to get deeper into that Scrum stuff, mentoring, coaching again.
• Too, learnt that one of my more intense customers will cut ties with us sooner or later. Came as bit of a surprise as we just spent a massive amount of time and energy getting things to work well for them. It's still a right-tool-for-the-right-job kind of problem, and in this case apparently we're just the wrong tool. From that perspective it seems not just a sane but the only good decision, and still it's sad after having poured a significant load of enthusiasm into something.
• Tried Pinksky. Took a peek at Glass and Foto. Torn between fear of missing out, the desire to play around with things and the increasing fatique about that load of different, competing, in a lot of cases early-stage (social) networks out there to date. Wonder whether that sheer amount of in most cases mutually incompatible systems is more than anything else pushing people back to where they came from, given it's hard to make an informed and more long-term decision where to move and have ones dear contacts and people around again. Trying to minimize ones own footprint here, still. 
• Noticed my latest attempt at handling microblogging went past its second birthday a few days ago. Totally missed any celebrating activities here. Missed out, though, on pondering how this approach generally affected my day-to-day perception of keeping random crap collected on the internet. Maybe later, all of that.
• Found myself discussing federation and related protocols again, after ActivityPub and pixelfed had its own share of security issues again. Calmed down about that a bit so no more words on it and still it's but a mess. Seems we're lost to either ugly proprietary walled gardens with data owned by shady entities that might turn against us all sooner or later - or small fragmented tools built mostly by somehow privileged enthusiast individuals lacking the perspective of people who rely on tools that are out here and "just" ready to be used without too much friction. Will we eventually manage to come up with something that resembles the ease of the early web, the creative chaos of 2010s Tumblr and the low-tech, lightweight attitude of gemini and gopher while not sacrificing the usability and accessibility of nowadays social media and digital communication tools? I doubt so.
• Stepped outside comfort zones again, then and now. Same links, different means of communication. In a positive way. Watched German TV series on streaming. Rediscovered awesome remixes of old favourites and got lost in that for a few evenings. Pondering music streaming again, currently on a Soundcloud Go (without the "+") subscription mainly to listen to new techno and electronics tracks. Been floating through the latest performance of Carmilla Sioux for HÖR Berlin recently on there, for these purposes the platform is still awesome. If only the app was actually offline-ready.
• Been not out there very much except for cycling to work. Spring mood winter mood but took some pictures of blooming cherry trees and maybe there's hope in that, somehow.

Closing this day this week. Watching the late afternoon unfold. Have a peaceful and inspiring weekend wherever you are.

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