log.

Concluding a long yet short week, fast-paced through a couple of days filled morning to evening with mostly appointments and long-running calls. List of personal achievements is shorter than one would like. But maybe that's part of how things are then and now, as well. Notes and noteworthy, unsorted and random:

• Delay and deviations in a critical project. Being overly optimistic for a second time and once I'll learn for sure. Still, stunned to see how many unknown unknowns there are to discover. Also, still: Training project lead communication skills. Attribute all successes fully to those who contributed to them. And stand in front to protect people if things fail. Not always comfortable but in my firm beliefs just how it should be.
• Water is back in the garden, so the season will finally start again. Still it's too cold to be there for longer, but at least this way seems trees and plants are safe from growing blossoms too early and falling prey to frost afterwards. Placed the wildlife camera elsewhere, hoping to finally catch the raccoon that apparently is emptying the bird feeding station.
• Accidentially visited an old Dresden cemetary inaccessible to the public most of the time. An interesting experience, learnt a lot, might have stayed much longer if it wasn't for the wintry, windy cold. Both amazed and concerned to see how many of these aspects of daily cultural life apparently rest mostly, not to say exclusively, on the shoulders of enthusiastic volunteers while everyone else has basically sneaked out of responsibility. 
• Took a Sunday walk with friends, a bit outside of Dresden. Place is called Windberg and it is what it says on the tin: A windy, cold afternoon, feeling much more like an autumn day than an actual moment in spring. Still nights are quite cold, and days are, too, all too often. And still we're direly missing rain.
• Longform music, electronics from Spain, on heavy rotation this week: Inglawt. Generally sinking more into that kind of harsh industrial techno while cycling to work at the moment. Digging through a load of musical recommendations, some more suitable than others. 
• Moved web.z428.eu from a self-run LittleLink installation to an omg.lol starting page. Too, decided to keep pixels.z428.eu dormant for the time being in favour of z428.some.pics. After the pixelfed mess a few weeks ago, I mainly wanted to focus on keeping "my" stuff to myself, but I learnt and found along the way that supporting sustainably built services is a good thing even though being able to keep backups of your data is a must. omg.lol seems a very friendly choice here, being a paid offering with a very fast and helpful support and an amazing feature set and, thank goodness, a well-crafted, easily accessible API to automate all odds and ends and retrieve your data and be enabled to take your stuff elsewhere if needed. Which feels good in all ways. It's good not having to keep full responsibility of ones own services yet to generally be able to.
• Splitting personal and professional computing devices a bit more. Which feels both weird and relieving in some ways. Trying to find enough join points in between both worlds to still work out. Also, moved to FOSS Browser from Brave on Android. Not more or less objections against the latter than before, but wondered whether the more lightweight approach has positive side-effects, specifically also for interacting with the limited set of social media platforms I still use, while also trying to cut down using dedicated apps for these (for different reasons). So far, it works mostly well. Not sure I'll keep that up, and probably it doesn't matter much anyway.
• Got to get my bicycle fixed. Broken back axis, all of a sudden. Amazed to see how difficult finding a good workshop service for these purposes is, specifically one that is focused on doing repair work not selling new products. Also, noticed how privileged DIY is at that point, personally lacking skills, time and an appropriate space for doing so. Hope this will eventually improve in the future. Will be trying bike rentals in the next week until this issue is resolved.
• Once again seriously striving to filter all political news out of my daily timelines, both directly in terms of news outlets and indirectly in terms of posts more or less angrily commenting on them. It's not that I don't have dedicated opinions on these but it again seems to make less and less sense to keep track of them online, to keep adding even more to the just all-too-common mood of anger and despair that's out there. I'd merrily follow anyone who feels like coming up with ideas, concepts and the will to get people enthusiastic about visions rather than pulling them down even more by outlining how nice things could be if it wasn't for reality and people blocking all progress. It doesn't help. On no particular level.

Moving on. Wrestling infrastructure, waiting for sun in the sky. Keeping up whichever speed is appropriate at times. Have a pleasant weekend wherever you are.

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