Went to Swetugg, a .NET-themed conference. AI is the dominant theme, like last year, but now it was less about the foundations of how it works and more about how you can design a solution that incorporates AI, or the things you need to be concerned with when shipping it to production.

One of the most interesting and inspiring sessions was by Mads Torgersen, the Program Manager at Microsoft for the C# language (which is what I work with). He talked about possible upcoming new language features and the thinking behind them, as well as some of the trade-offs they’re discussing. How OK is it to break existing code for 1% of language users, in order to deliver the best version of a new feature to 100% of them?

C# has existed for so many years that the changes now can only be relatively small, a bit of sugar on top of the cake we already have. But I’m still rather excited about some of them.

It was also just really interesting to hear about the process, which is very open, with discussion documents available on Github. Designing an entire programming language sounds like such a faraway, impossible thing, distant magic – and here is an entirely normal human being who does just that.

On the one hand, during the weeks when the kids are with Eric, I have more free time than ever. I could go out to concerts or jazz clubs or all sorts of places.

On the other hand, for those weeks I am the only person taking care of Nysse. If I’m gone from early morning to late night, he’s going to be alone and hungry and cold. (I’ve tried waiting around in the mornings to see if he’ll come in again after I let him out after his breakfast, but he doesn’t.) So I feel less guilty if I book an evening activity for when Ingrid and Adrian are staying with me, even though I am then leaving them alone. Poor Nysse got the short end of the stick in the divorce.

Half an hour of morning sun today, which both Nysse and I made sure to catch.

Happy forty-seven and a half to me!

For my birthday this summer I wanted to go out to have a nice restaurant brunch. I was going to wait until September so the brunch places in the city would open again after the summer. But then it was the kids’ birthdays, and the divorce, and Christmas, and more divorce, and it never happened.

Today Ingrid, Adrian and I finally went for my birthday brunch at Kelp, a very local restaurant, just five minutes’ walk from home. We all ended up ordering the same things: scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, single-variety Swedish apple juice, and French toast with a home-made berry compote. And then, while Ingrid and I were bemoaning how full we were, another serving of French toast for Adrian, who is in that teenage bottomless phase. Very nice.

My conclusion from the Friday evening series of new classical music is that modern classical music is often too modern for me. My brain can’t find anything there to hold on to and it just feels like shapeless sounds.

Today’s concert was for the unusual combination of cello and accordion. They alternated between the very old (music by Hildegard von Bingen) and the very new (Jouni Kaipainen, Britta Byström, Sofia Gubajdulina). The very old was excellent; the very new was too much.

This is not a series I will be renewing for the next season.

It must be coming up to a year now that I’ve been busy with the Stockholm embroidery. Time to get it done. We have a weekend embroidery workshop planned for the end of March, and my goal now is to finish it before then so that I can finally do something else.

High school students in Sweden write a diploma essay, a kind of a research project, during their third year. It follows an academic process, so part of the work involves disputation of someone else’s work. Ingrid is reading through someone’s essay and has strong opinions about their subpar writing skills, and how much harder that makes it to read and understand the essay. Using fancy words to sound sophisticated while not really understanding those words; being sloppy with commas; losing track of where your sentence construction was going. I tell her to pity her poor teachers who have to read this kind of writing all the time.

I’m still clinging to the tretton37 backpack. Now that I’m working for another consultancy, it would be too weird to keep using tretton37-branded gear… so I anonymized it. The logo was only glued on, and after more than seven years, easy to rip off. There’s just this vague outline left. Symbolic, isn’t it?

Cleaned out and sorted through Adrian’s hat and glove basket in the hall. For some reason I’ve been assuming that he would do it himself, but clearly it doesn’t bother him that half the space in it is taken up by things he has outgrown.

Well, it bothers me, so I did it for him.

There were hats in there that are so small he literally can’t have worn them since he was in pre-school. The fingerless gloves I made for him in 2017. And underneath the too-small hats and scarves, there was a pile of literal junk. It was like looking through a window into an earlier time.

Several safety reflectors. Mitten clips, which I had forgotten were even a thing. Stones, of course, and sticks and chestnuts. A broken balloon. A marble, a bread bag tie, and a broken pencil.

At some point in time, each of these things was important enough for him to put in the basket.

I went to a local yarn shop. The visit did not go as planned.

My one goal was to buy a soft mid-weight yarn for a hat in a neutral-ish colour. Maybe like a nice hand-dyed grey or beige. Maybe they’d have something like the Malabrigo Rios I used for a pair of scarves but in a more subdued colourway.

(I need a hat to pair with my red leather jacket. My spring/autumn hat is red, and my gloves are red, and the overall impression of them all together is just way too red, so I need to break it up. And also, it is crazy that I am wearing my spring/autumn outerwear in January.)

Did I buy anything like that? Not at all. I came home with almost the opposite. Rosarios 4 Bulky Light Print is super bulky (not mid-weight) and definitely not a neutral colour. But it was so soft and I loved the colour so much.

I’ve never used a yarn even close to this kind of weight. You can’t really get a feel for it from the photo, I think – should have included a banana for scale. The hole in the middle of the knitting is the size of my fist, and each stitch is about the size of the nail of my little finger. Huge!

Using this yarn feels very different than my usual projects. It goes very fast, but also requires a whole other kind of attention than my usual knits; not something I could do while reading, for example. It’s nice to try something new! And I’ll get a hat out of it that definitely won’t be red. It remains to be seen whether I can wear it with the red jacket; it might be a bit too much. The sewing & crafts fair is coming up in a month, hopefully I’ll find an actual mid-weight hand-dyed grey yarn there.

I also bought material for a pair of felted slippers. I’ve never knitted anything with the intention of felting it, so that will also be entirely new.