This year’s summer party at work took place remotely on Google Meet. I enjoyed it more than I had expected.

First a tretton37 mixologist led us through making fizzy summer cocktails. I replaced this with bubbly pink lemonade even though there was a non-alcoholic option because it sounded like more work than it was worth, just with buying all the ingredients, but this was a lot of fun just to watch, as TV or something. I have some hilariously funny and entertaining colleagues.

Then we had a quiz on Kahoot while chit-chatting in the Google Meet. I made it into top 5 (out of 80+) for a while and for a moment even reached second place, but the last 10 questions for double points were all music-related and by the end I wasn’t even in the top 10.

The party ended with a live streamed concert of covers of rock classics with song and two acoustic guitars. Live streamed concerts are not like the real thing, but when I’ve met the people in real life before, it’s almost like the real thing. And yet again I was super impressed with what talented colleagues I have.

Every time I make shakshouka, I struggle with getting all the eggs to the right degree of doneness. Very often I end up with some eggs almost hard-boiled while others still have runny whites. I guess it’s the time it takes to get them all into the stew. By the time I crack the last one into its place, the first one has probably had a full minute to cook.

Today I thought I would do something clever. I cracked all six eggs in advance into six cups so that I could then get them all into the tomato sauce really quickly. This way, I thought, they would all start cooking at almost the same time and be done at the same time.

And it made no bloody difference whatsoever. Again two of the eggs were well done while two others were still completely runny! I have no idea why they behave so annoyingly or what to do about it. It’s not like some are closer to the middle and get more heat.

Today’s lunchtime talk went well, with the live coding and everything. We had some last minute technical problems which we solved with literally a couple of minutes to spare. Firefox refused to share camera and desktop at the same time, and Chrome refused to share the desktop at all, so I ended up joining the session twice – once from Firefox for the camera feed and once more from Chrome to share my desktop. And those two took so much CPU that the performance of all other applications really suffered. Builds were much slower than normal and I kept having to wait, and asking the audience to wait, before I could show the results.

It all worked out in the end. Even my time estimates did! I got done when I had hoped to be done, and had time for a few questions in the end.

If you want to hear the talk, you can find it here.

For barely a week of magnificently blossoming cherry trees, we get weeks and weeks of mess afterwards. First there are the petals. Then the husks and stalks of the blossoms themselves. It literally takes weeks for the trees to shed them all. On the stairs they don’t matter so much, but the trees also shed this chaff on the deck and the furniture there. Every time I go out to sit on the deck, I keep having to brush the chair seat first. (And next we’ll have the green failed berries falling – and then of course the fallen cherries themselves.)

Still totally worth it, though. And better than pine needles.

I love sitting in the living room with the door open towards the garden early in the morning, when the air is still cool and the grass is still wet with dew, hearing the birds sing and smelling the fresh, green smell of morning.

The presentation I promised to do is happening on Wednesday. I did start preparing in good time and actually have most of it figured out. As I was working on it, I came to realize that for this topic it would make most sense to just skip all the usual Powerpoint slides and just write code, live, on screen, during the session. Which I have never done before, so I can’t just wing it the way I normally tend to do with presentations. I can’t even really estimate how much coding I can fit into one hour. So here I am, spending my Sunday afternoon talking to myself while writing the same code for the third time now.

If you want to see me do this live on Wednesday, here’s the link: Massaging MongoDB data.

Adrian and one of his friends, each with a phone in their hands. Well, they are outdoors…

I really should mow the lawn, I guess. I don’t mind the way it looks, but it’s not very inviting to walk on like this.

But I can mostly manage to make myself do two or maybe three chores per day on weekends (apart from the basics like making sure everyone is fed) and nothing at all on weekdays, and the lawn has not made it into the top three, so I guess that’s not happening yet.

I have a vaccination appointment!

As soon as the news were out that bookings were open for those born in 1977 to 1981, I dropped everything I was doing and logged in. It took me four attempts to book an appointment because the slots kept disappearing before I managed to confirm the booking. On my fourth attempt I made sure to pick a random time in the middle of the day – not the beginning, not the end, not lunchtime – and then finally I got lucky.

Ten days to my appointment. Then another 6 or 7 weeks after that for the second dose. Maybe I could actually travel somewhere in August or September.

The workouts are happening outside now that it’s so warm.

I’m kind of pleased that I’ve managed to keep up my daily workouts for 7 months now. Thinking of buying bigger dumbbells yet again, but then again I’m not sure if I’ll have the discipline during the summer break, and who knows what happens in autumn anyway…