Fri:13.Nov.20 Pantin.fr

A week of being geek, until almost going crazy. About a month ago I started a new side project, slowly. Its goal being promoting the countryside and fostering the urban exodus. My expertise and motivation in the field will drive and guide me, but until there's something to promote and position I will have to build a tool, and go through the dark zones of setting up frameworks, mastering new coding languages, envisioning and writing functionality, and so forth. I'm certainly a couple of months away of putting something out there, especially if I hit walls like I did this week: an issue in an underlying framework caused a major setback, from formatting and reinstalling my entire machine (freeing tons of disc space and upgrading to Catalina along the way) to understanding what's actually happening under the hood to identifying and eliminating the problem. Things are now running (locally through Docker) again, an API Platform/Symfony in good old PHP (version 7.4 and not 3, with which everything started back in the nineties for me) powered API that is feeding a React with Redux driven frontend app in fancy ES6 (also known as Javascript, quite a despised language back then), which is making massive usage of Leaflet-powered and GeoJSON fed maps (of course, I love maps). We'll see where all this leads, at least to yet another boost of my developer skills.

P.S. And yes, it's Friday 13 again. Probably my favourite and most posted weekday day combination!

Mon:02.Nov.20 Pantin.fr

Back in Pantin, back to school (for five year old Max), back in lockdown, back to 100% homeoffice. And the next Tour de France will go through the Morvan, I can't wait for July 2 next year and a extra long 248 km stage. Now will follow one month of being locked away at home, I will need to put a new running routine in place... it's been almost 3 weeks since I didn't exercise! But hard work with Berni the Builder at our cottage has been equally challenging, and even lead to major progress of the Zwergenzimmer und -bad (it's not bad, just black and white).

Mon:26.Oct.20 Mailly-le-Château.fr

School holidays for Max, remote work from the cottage for me. And besides some more renovation work, preparing the ground for Berni the Builder who'll arrive tomorrow to hopefully push the project much closer towards realisation. I spent hours plastering and painting the new room (aka Zwergenzimmer) over the last days, and by the end of the week I hope that the doors as well as the floors (as well as the radiotors) will be in place. And all this while listening to hours of Der tagesschau Zukunfts-Podcast: mal angenommen and Deezer Flow.

Wed:14.Oct.20 Pantin.fr

Just finished the last Mr. Robot episode, what a masterpiece. Four seasons overall, nicely packaged and brought to an end. Brilliant. It took me a while to jump on the series bandwaggon, back in 2013 or so it all started with Breaking Bad. It followed a handful of others, like Better Call Saul (we just finished Season 5 before jumping back to the final season of Mr Robot), Chernobyl, Mindhunter or Dark. The bar is high for a new series, good so since they're quite some timesinks. Back to some occasional Mubi sessions, the online streamer to which we switched right at the beginnning of the pandemic, in exchange for Netflix.

Sun:27.Sep.20 Pantin.fr

Hooray, I am up-to-date with bringing all the colourful pictures to my blog! I finally found a decent way to use my Macbook's Preview tool to bulk edit my photos, no more excuse for not having a Photoshop licence. It is still a rather clunky process, since I need to 1) download the files to my computer, 2) (bulk) convert them from HEIC to something exploitable, 3) crop & resize, export and finally 4) put them here, but it's faster than what I tried to do before. Let's see whether I can keep up with coloring my posts on time, since the vast majority of the images have been added to posts that aren't visible to anybody but me (serving as my virtual memories).

The Tour is over, and was a blast to follow. And I attended my Twentieth C̶e̶n̶t̶u̶r̶y̶ ̶F̶o̶x̶ Tour stage overall, despite being a boring one (as expected, being the last one of the race). More to come next year, hopefully. It's time to get back to those mountains, and more imporantly: bring friends and stencils!

180 kilometers with CSP through sun, wind, and rain, and 12 along the canal: a weekend of 8 hours of sport. Now I just need to clean and fix my now just 1000+ kilometer old Silberpfeil, besides being a true beauty, perfectly streamlined and a featherweight it does have some c̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ over the edge features like the annoying R.A.T. or the even more annoying seatpost (who keeps sliding down).