• Again forgot I have a blog. This is starting to become a disturbing pattern. Perhaps I should start thinking about what kind of info I’m actually happy having online, publically and visibly? If this is to be some sort of diary, that’s not working anymore. That kind of blogosphere is dead.

Freitag, 22.09.

• Keep forgetting I have a blog … perhaps if I made it private only I’d write into it more? Or perhaps I could buy a diary made from dead tree?

• trying to resume the blog but expecting myself to only keep going again for a few days
• corona happened, obvi
• curiously enough, life otherwise settled - or perhaps it was i who became more settled on the inside?
• it’s late now; good night, world!

• Last couple of days stressful because of people interesting themselves in the free room. Lots of fears and feelings involved with the whole topic, I’ve learned. Trying to cope with it all, but productivity continues to suffer for it.

• Woke up around 9, but stayed in bed an hour longer, then shower & prep’d breakfast for guests, Jonas & self … Levin off to fetch another friend, so 6 for breakfast on our little table
• Called Hai-Feng to call about meeting Lau Ha later, but they’re too busy with travel preparations, so one appointment less for the day, thank God. Some mails, then greeting next prospective tenant (Jorge from Spain), after some more mails, etc., but no work on the article today, sadly. In the evening, on short notice another prospective tenant - feeling difficulty with related thoughts, feelings & considerations
• Note to self: try to write blog posts for the day while that day’s date is still displayed in the calendar

• tired like **, but out of bed without much trouble, thank God!
• met with Susanne at 10 as planned, lots of chatting after which we got the job done and read through all of the short stories Kenan had sent us
• afterwards met up with Christine to have lunch and then decided to go home and have a nap (too tired for the library)
• rested for a while, then finished cleaning the flat, installed newest Linux Mint for Jonas, partook in his sort-of going-away prayers (Karim and Zendehs also around; lovely), then took Róisín and Levin to mosque for night prayers as promised
• arrived at library around 8pm, some procrastination (fixed the newest mailing list problem, d’oh) then finally got some writing done
• in bed half past midnight

• at library much before 12; good! completing missing diary entries, some work on the MSA website for the professor, also wrote newest receivable invoices (booyah, “receivable invoice”, new word of the day!)
• spent most time moving the Miteinander page to the new server
• no lunch; later a walk with Christian
• after arriving back home, big house-cleaning (despite it not being spring, nor the usual time of day for such activities; no way around it though - great fun though even with the guests who happened to arrive in the middle of it)
• bed at 3AM; far too late!!!

• up a bit too late; but in time to greet first prospective new flatmate … mixed feelings (hadn’t thought of smokers when writing the ad)
• off to meet Fayçal to hand in travel expenses report and explain Miteinander admin interface; ended up doing some bugfixing there until 5PM
• then home for food and to finish the bugfixing session
• at the end of the day, still haven’t started work on the paper :(

• back to the library, no excuses :}
• wanted to start working on the paper, but lacked some info, so looked into using TinyMCE for AOP and also sifted through some mails. Coffee with Nina, dinner at Zendeh’s place, back to the library to do Cambridge trip travel expense report

• better once more; not sure but might have fallen asleep before midnight…
• finally finished setting up the new phone and relegated the old one to a life of DLNA rendering
• looked into adapting TinyMCE 4 for AOP purposes - quite promising
• today Jonas came home from his weekend trip

• woke up surprisingly early and feeling a little better, but worse again towards the afternoon. lots of tea-drinking, soup-eating and warm-staying…

• still sick, mostly lay in bed and slept. Did watch first two season two episodes of The Expanse; very enjoyable
• trainride back to Leipzig in the evening; feeling a little better (might just be the Ibuprofin working its temporary magic though)

(Thursday)

• up at 4 to catch train at 5; caught a cold for reals now
• flight again rather pleasant, happy about it since next RyanAir-necessitating trip will come. Not happy at all about automated border security control system at Berlin-Schönefeld * degrades people to sheep, Orwell & Huxley now sad drinking buddies at best
• surprisingly almost everybody at home in Berlin. But me really sick now and feeling not well at all

(Wednesday)

• boiler got fixed yesterday, unfortunately had a bad night, feeling like I’m coming down with a cold. Spending the morning working at home snugged up to the radiator, d’oh
• second meeting with Soner, this time able to set up everything on his laptop, also some good talk about big-pic questions & the website
• today met Cem from Turkey, some talk about political situation there; quite sad but nice how easy it is to make friends in Cambridge
• nothing special for the evening, need to pack anyways

(Tuesday)

• still no hot water, nor heating (but repair chap announced himself to be back today w/ spare parts), so we decided to go for a swim in the morning. Unfortunately a big and disgusting letdown , city council-run (!) swimming pool may look nice and modern but is broken and filthy on the inside. Also just 1.3m of depth at shallow end of their biggest pool, are you kidding me? At least £4.50 buys you a reasonably hot shower
• to set off the unpleasantry, invited by Joe to Hot Numbers. Very hipsterlike, but best. filter. coffee. ever. Made in V60 process (special filter equipment; must remember!)
• 2h work stint at UC (wherelse?), meeting Yomna again before leaving for lunch w/ Reneé. The place is quiet and comfy, so staying there for more work & also when coffee plans cancelled by Y. Instead back home then for chillaxing & then “best pizza of Cambridge” at a pub (Esmerald? Emerald?) * it really is! Another quick game night; bed

(Monday)

• breakfast, no shower (boiler broken, house bloody cold); again headed to the UC for Skype meeting with Jean; finally able to set things up for him like it should have worked weeks ago
• only a snack for lunch, continuing to work on AOP things as discussed on Saturday & today * meeting wonderful Pakistani-American artist Mourad at the UC, very interesting talk on interpretation, art, Sufism, life, the universe & everything
• after dinner, board games w/ Joe & Steven but not Jon

(Sunday)

• up late, still exhausted from long Saturday night; breakfast then cleaning the house together (a vacuum is called a hoover, which is also the verb * why? Because 1st major producer of vacs in UK was called Hoover. No relation of Edgar’s hopefully?)
• no work, lots of chillaxing instead
• Joe and I decide to go watch Rogue One (really good methinks) at picturehouse w/ most ridiculously seats ever

(Saturday)

• breakfast today together, then nice walk to MRC & some time for more work there
• off to meeting 1 hour early again, no probs though as it means we get to have the rare, really good Falafel at a stand somewhere in city center (orientation still lacking a bit) … on the way to UC, Chinese girls want their pic taken with me * lots of them here, regrettably not a single word of English
• not difficult to find Soner, always has his kids with him. Tour of the city, King’s College, etc. Then productive meeting, able to discuss some issues and form sort of a roadmap, no time to set him up though
• long walk with Joe, more touristy things to see but also more authentic parts, esp. along the Cam. Shirt visit to one of the pubs. Worth of note: real good lemonade & famous botany professors come in the Goth variant here
• at 7 dinner party at a friend’s of Joe’s whose name (Jiři) is unfortunately impossible to pronounce for me, George will have to do. Amazing people, amazing evening; most notably also 1st chance to get to know Reneé

(Friday)

• up w/o alarm, Joe already at work, breakfast & also some work
• off to local Mosque at 1 but upon arrival it’s only 12 * time difference ofc! Tour of C. city center, no prob at all to find University Center, back to Mosque in time for 1st sermon (they have two because of too many people) … nicely down-to-earth and non-fundamentalist, lovely in comparison to problematic situation in Germany
• Joe back home around 4; off to supermarkt together, then after some chillaxing awesome kitchen action * homemade pasta (homemade Tortelloni nonetheless) ftw!
• work to prepare for meeting tomorrow; bed

(Thursday)

• flight surprisingly without any problems, even though it was with dreaded RyanAir
• picked up from the train station by Joe, who is a little sicklish; mail to Soner re. 1st meeting; met Joe’s flatmates (1 new, 1 still the same as in London 4 years ago. Wow, it’s been long!)
• pizza, bed

• Stay-at-home day, too much NWN, but managed to decide for one of the five Ryanair-compatible backpacks; going to have to send the other ones back. Also did some MSA things; far too many in fact, and at the same time not enough at all. The dreaded/dreadful situation of too much to do, too little energy to do it again

• Too tired/exhausted to write anything … now can’t really remember the day anymore. Stayed at home until the BBC journo called for the interview, then off to the library, in the evening went to the Telegraph; stayed there much too late

• Difficult to get up after good if a bit exhausting weekend in Berlin; meeting with colleagues somewhat frightening (us humans: so similar yet so distinct) and at the same time had some ideas for how to go on
• Meeting at 10, good talk and good work, now have to set up Contao and WordPress for Robert to play around with; hackathon at beginning of April
• Lunch with Jonathan, then went and bought a new pullover for myself; he wanted the same but had to ask wife first (upset otherwise; us humans: so strong yet vulnerable often, too)
• Good time at the library, except for the mailing lists breaking again. Fed up with Mailman, installed phplist only to discover it doesn’t serve the same purpose; going to try Dada Mail tomorrow - author says it’s concept art, not software; who could resist. Can’t keep dealing with the lists for much longer though, told relevant people as much
• Home too late; RyanAir-compatible backpacks have arrived from $big_unethical_warehouse, well, well. Need to mock-pack them tomorrow and weigh, etc. Dinner, some Neverwinter Nights, then night for real

• Up at 6, prayers, small breakfast, waiting for Johannes but to no avail, so went to the swimming baths by myself; felt good afterwards, but incredibly tired, so back to bed, up again at 9, bigger breakfast, meeting with the professor
• Got in two hours of AOP work at the library, then time to go visit Anderl at his new workshop and marvel at the circular saw bench which he’s very proud off. Coffee, a visit to the hardware store, back to library, but only for five minutes because I had forgotten Hai-Feng’s birthday, so off to them, yummy birthday cake. Then back to the library to organize the Cambridge trip and buy a couple of airline-approved cabin backpacks to compare against one another. Some more AOP work, then home for dinner
• After dinner very tired again; some Settlers II, at 10 Johannes comes by for help setting up his new Linux Mint installation - it’s still burned for me and I’m happy with Debian Unstable but makes things easy enough to be a real option to Windows for him, very happy about that
• Got lost reading news on the internet, fell asleep around 2 or so - note to self: go easy on yourself come Monday, drink plenty, sleep plenty!

• Up early because of appointment, but cancelled by email; back to sleep. Later woken up by pretty senseless phone call; good time for breakfast though
• Home office until half past two, then to the library for coffee appointment and more AOP work
• (Jazz club)[http://www.jazzclub-leipzig.de/telegraph] in the evening, met Tobi and Johannes there

• Out of bed quickly to meet Jonathan at the library, but made the mistake of looking at mails first; still some aftermath to the MSA move to take care of
• Spent all the library time fixing things not yet in order instead of working on the AOP work I had planned on doing - frustrating, but oh well. Fun to help Jonathan study for his pathology exams: he wants to ask me questions and help me figure them out instead of the other way around. The result being I now know how to determine whether someone is really dead, hoping there’ll never be use for that, though
• After library, helped Peyman write another job application, then home, latest episode of Madam Secretary, then some Settlers II; bed

• Woke up in time for breakfast with Jonas and his mom; nice especially since she insists on always cleaning up the kitchen right away
• Too tired to continue working on the MSA move. Called Peyman instead to ask about going for a walk in the snow. Went to a nature reserve around 30km east of Leipzig, beautiful forest and lovely to walk there with all the snowing that was happening. Also found a hunter’s restaurant in the area where they said they’d be happy to provide me with some deer sinew … another step towards Ötzi-the-Iceman arrows! Afterwards Persian food at Peyman’s place, yummy
• Back home finally managed to finish the MSA move (not without around an hour of downtime due to some trouble getting the LetsEncrypt certificate generation working, but still huge feeling of relief

• Jonas’s birthday, which meant the mailman ringing the doorbell at 9:30 or so; stayed up instead of going back to bed, but tired throughout the day
• More work on moving all the MSA sites to their new home; boring and difficult

• Woken up by alarm, just enough time to have breakfast and look into non-working domain (turned out server had banned ourselves), then Johannes at the door for us to go swimming; way there and back almost more water from above than water from below in the swimming pool
• Spent the day moving MSA domains to their new server; slow going, in the end too tired to finish

• Woke up early, but depressed mood. Only got up when Jonathan wrote asking to come around. Coffee; better. Talked about this and that, watched an episode of Code Black, then went for a rather long walk into the city, snack there
• Worked on moving ownCloud to its new server for most of the day
• Round of Settlers II with Johannes in the evening; but his Windows installation had some malware, so installed Linux trying to also fix the Windows with it - no luck, but he’s happy with being able to go online using the Linux

• Alarm at 9:30, breakfast with Jonas at 10, good. Dishes, kitchen, stuff, then off to the garden for some shooting. Then very tired, back to bed for an hour
• Arrived at the library around 1 o’clock, continued working on AOP things. 7 o’clock late lunch at the canteen whilst continuing to edit dad’s latest book
• Back home, very tired, one episode of Bones, helped Jonas get data out of his broken harddrive’s backup files. Off to bed, some Discworld reading

• Out of bed rather slowly; shower first, then breakfast. Afterwards did little tidbits then downstairs to do a half-hour of shooting. Back to the flat, short discussion with Jonas on how to go about the day; decided to go to the library
• Resumed working on the AOP software and made some progress setting up things for Sinatra … Pomodoro not actually all that bad, might try with it again
• Stopped work at half past five, met with Jonas in the city to go shopping for a 2-in-1 backpack-slash-pannier; only found the one by Ortlieb but not the one by Vaude which looks a bit more interesting. Shame it’s so difficult to get your hands on smaller company’s products as a shop called Banjo Brothers seems to have a cool offering
• Evening a bit chaotic and fractured: first happened upon Coopers in the stairwell which resulted in setting up their wifi router for the house network as well (the last one of the bunch thankfully); then wanted to watch some series but Jonas’s harddrive began to die so set up Linux Mint on a USB stick for him and set it to run backup during the night using the pretty cool GNU ddrescue

• Up late but out of bed quickly; egg, tomatoes and bread for breakfast; last coffee beans. Laundry and shower, then started trying to repair the Nexus 5 until late afternoon - no luck (won’t accept SIM card anymore)
• Went for some archery practice; then did a walk to find out if there was a concert tonight at Laden auf Zeit; unfortunately not: next time on the 16th - supermarket instead
• Prepped food, finally setup router for Jule and Felix, installed it at their flat; all good now
• Looked for a new car racing game to play with Johannes, found Screamer 4x4 … could have been nice, but unfortunately too buggy; still played some, then said good-night; set up Jekyll

• Woken up by Kareem singing, him and Jonas off to devotions
• Sewed the down winter blanket finally; tried out some Pomodoro apps while doing it - went to the garden to shoot the bow as a reward (snow, but already melting), met Jana & Sebastian there, nice
• Wanted to set up new neighbour’s wifi router, ended up installing XFCE on T23 instead and trying to get proper resolution working there; without success
• Invited for dinner at Yaman’s place, tasty, Majd also there, talked for a couple of hours. Back home, Johannes back in town, both he and Cindy not ill anymore