Today was a sightseeing day in Prague. First we all went on a boat cruise together, up and down the Vltava. The afternoon was free time, which I spent together with some other 1337 ninjas walking around the city centre, visiting the castle and cathedral and other such obvious sights.

The boat trip was not particularly exciting. There was no guide to tell us anything about what we saw. And the Vltava is so wide that you don’t really get a very good view of the city this way. The clear highlight of the cruise was a yachting event that we passed. Half a dozen little yachts were going up and down the river between colourful buoys. The wind was brisk to say the least, and they were going at great speed, very close to each other. There were several near crashes and we saw one sailor go overboard. Compared to this, the rest of the trip was bland.

The city was chock full of tourists, especially Chinese ones. Literally busload after busload of them, everywhere. I was going to go see the old town square and the old astronomical clock but the square and even the streets leading to it were so full that I gave up before getting there, and turned away and walked in another direction. The Charles bridge likewise could barely be seen between all the selfie-takers and souvenir vendors.

The city has adapted to the tourists and their preferences more than I would wish. Every single place charges an entrance fee – even churches! I like churches and when I am in a strange city I like to look into them, both the splendid cathedrals and the small, simple back street churches. Here, I couldn’t do that, because paying for every single one would get expensive fast. In the St. Vitus cathedral, where I peeked in but decided against paying, visitors couldn’t even walk around freely – there was a narrow path that you had to follow, at the same pace as everyone before and after you, which rather takes away the whole point of visiting a church.

Instead I admired it from the outside. And as an added bonus, a choir was visiting the cathedral square at the same time and sang beautifully – mostly for themselves, I guess, but since they were outside and not behind an entrance fee, the rest of us could also enjoy it.

All of the city centre is full of dozens of soulless shops hoping to sell luxury brands to the Chinese. And every café and street vendor sells identical trdelník cakes, which have no flavour and no obvious redeeming qualities. They’ve obviously been cooked up for tourists only, because they definitely aren’t traditional to Czechia – I never saw anything like them during my previous two trips to Prague.

Once you get away from the most famous parts of the city, it is nice. But on the whole, it wasn’t what I had hoped for or what it used to be.

This was a very busy day with talks and presentations and workshops and so on, and I barely remembered I owned a camera, which is a pity. This is the only photo I have from today – from my walk back to the hotel after dinner.

My own presentation was very well received and – if you’ll excuse me for boasting – I’ve already been asked if I can do it again for other audiences.

For the technically minded among you, the title of my session was “Fumbling towards multi-tenancy” and I talked about how we took the application that I’m currently working with from “what’s a tenant” to multi-tenancy. I spoke about the choice between multi-instance and multi-tenant apps, and then multi-database vs shared database for the data layer. And some technical details about implementing our chosen path (multi-tenant with a shared database) using .NET Core and Entity Framework: query filters, defensive saving and row-level security.

In Prague for this year’s 1337 conference, which starts tomorrow. I’ll be holding a talk tomorrow afternoon and I had hoped to prepare earlier but somehow kept not finding time, so I spent most of my flight here working on my presentation. I’m looking forward to the conference weekend as a whole and I’m feeling pretty confident about the talk – I hope the audience will find it interesting.

When Adrian makes things, they all tend to turn into weapons. Today he made at least two swords, two guns, and some random shapes that he then also decided were guns.

Can’t get enough of them. The way the whole large tree is softly white, all covered in blossoms – this magnificent burst of energy to procreate!

Ingrid is giving Adrian a master class in skipping rope technique.

There is a fridge in the living room.

The fridge is uncommonly free from drawings, class schedules, scout schedules, theatre tickets, funny magnets, and other junk. I’m sure that it will immediately fill up again as soon as it moves back into the kitchen.

I flew to London for a concert. Which felt incredibly wasteful and decadent, but Dead Can Dance is one of a very few bands about which I have thought for years that one day I would want to see them perform live.

The concert was good but not excellent; the sound level of course ridiculous as ever (earplugs ftw). I’m glad I went to see and hear them, but I don’t feel any need to do it again.

I had several hours of free time before the concert. After I had picked up my tickets at the Hammersmith Apollo, I googled for “walks in Hammersmith”, remembering all the pleasant, well-planned and well-documented walks Eric and I used to do in London and elsewhere in the UK.

And the Internet delivered – or rather, the Inner London Ramblers did. Their web site described a nice-sounding circular walk in Hammersmith, of a very suitable length, passing almost exactly where I was. So I spent two hours rambling in Hammersmith, Barnes and Chiswick – along the Thames, the Leg o’ Mutton reservoir, Chiswick gardens and then small lanes in Hammersmith. It was utterly lovely and I realized just how much I sometimes miss London.

London has something that Stockholm doesn’t. Stockholm is tidy and well-ordered and straight; London is quirky and scruffy and full of character. It’s quirky in an unselfconscious way, without even trying. Much of it is due to age. London lets old things be, whereas Stockholm straightens them out and replaces and upgrades. London has little crooked lanes and rusty old iron fences and crumbling stone. Stockholm has straight cycle paths and

There are benefits to the Stockholm approach, of course: nearly everything in Stockholm is accessible for wheelchairs and pushchairs, for example, while London still marks specific Tube stations as accessible – and most aren’t. But as a visitor with two working legs and no pram to push, oh I do love London so much.

The kitchen remodeling is about to start for real – Anton the builder and his sidekick will start tearing out the old kitchen soon. We emptied out everything from the old kitchen today, moving the essentials into the living room and packing away everything else. Half the office/library is full of boxes.

All of us like having our feet up when we sit in the sofa. Sometimes we curl up with our legs on the sofa, sometimes we put our feet on the sofa table. Very rarely does anyone sit on the sofa like polite people do, with our feet on the floor.

It just isn’t comfortable! Maybe there’s something physiological and evolutionary behind this, or maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t like sitting with my feet far below me. Even on my desk chair, I often find myself with both legs curled up on the chair in some shape.