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The lake we visited yesterday and like 99% of nature around it was still dormant. Spring is in the air only when the sun comes out. Here and there 1 out of 10 bushes and cherry tree will bloom, others are not quite feeling it. Still a good day outdoors, but at ~4°C you need a thick jacket.
Nothing recent to report, I'm getting to know Claude, Nono, and Goose. So much that my (unrelated, lalala) new t-shirt sports this friendly Riot Goose:
No LiteLLM involved, so very happy.
In other news, I liked the procedure of doing a what was supposed to be a boring support call once - this was quite a handful of years ago. Fellow employee had issues with something something Windows, and we thought why not just call for support. Which we had never ever done. So I did, after I elicited the number to call from a chat. No bots then, just humans.
The issue we had could not be solved by $person over the phone, then $issue was escalated. I took great care to be concise, friendly, and refer to the previosly shared information every time.
The 4th person (or nth, I forgot) picked up the phone and upon my first sentence angrily replied WHERE DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER FROM TELL ME THE NAME and made me say the name of the previous contact. (Sorry Chadenguna, you sure meant well.) I was unimpressed, except for the obvious fact that obviously the support dept did not know what they were doing, and complied. I may or may not have added insult to surprise by bothering the person with how important using the product was for us.
The issue was solved, as in "suddenly it works the next day", after a 1287 digit code was relayed to me by phone, but boy must MS version licensing have been a mess in their backoffice. Globally distributed system, my ass.
I guess this was the equivalent of the error message saying "this error message should never be shown", and a debug log somewhere that was found and quietly fixed later.
I usually sleep on my back. Also since my New York trip I wear this eye mask with cartoon eyes on it, to my wife's amused dismay. But I do sleep much better in the dark.
Am tempted to obtain a Pepe the frog version in addition to this goodie from the New York hotel. Really comfy!
At times doggo takes my spot on the bed, croissant curl style, and I fold around him 🥐. A two humans, one dog constellation is possible only when the dog picks the middle, in baguette position 🥖 long side parallel. Fortunately he leaves the bed at some point because the cool wooden floor is more comfy apparently, or any spot his Bedsure pillow is.
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Malte was awarded an award for lifetime cuteness of floofness recently. The gift associated with the award ceremony was one specimen like this, it was adopted instantly and carried like a trophy.
And it has survived to this day (handful of days).
I'm waiting for my peppers to grow abundantly, drowning my balcony in peppers. Alas, that will have to wait until August. But I am hopeful.
Just last week I pepared this year's chili sauce from 1.5 drawers worth of peppers from the last harvest and peppers I had bought here and there. The spiciest I ever made, and I learned the difficult word in Mandarin for a variety that features, 斷魂椒 which has the heat-indicative translation of soul-crushing pepper. Well yes, it is that hot. Start with a few drops of oil for a bowl of ramen, work from there.
The more painful part is that I wrote by hand the cultivar name on each label (lower right) on a segment of about 18x7mm. Ouch, my hand still hurts,
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This made me laugh, it was sent to me:
The dog in larger-than-life mangled through AI with four of his favourite females from when we still had snow beginning of the week.
The snow and ice was gone by Tuesday, the sign about mulled wine feels seriously out of place at 15C. Almost smells like spring instead, that was quick!
Aufsteller auf der Straße am Restaurant, gesehen von wenigen Tagen gerade als das Tauwetter einsetzte. Da zeigt jemand dürren Humor. Heute mit bald 15 Grad ist das der gefühlt wahre Schnee von gestern =) #berlin #restaurant #glühwein #winter #humour #humor
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Tiger here too. Dragons.. well there's Fuchur from Ende's Neverending Story. Watching the movie as a kid both traumatized me because the book was so much more vivid and my imagination so very different from what I saw on the screen. Then again, Fuchur looks like a flying dog which i did not understand at the time. Not the look I expected, but the one character they got right. The 10yo me learned to distinguish between stories in a book and the concept of a movie adaptation.
Nevertheless I got hooked to the screen for quite a while. And I went to see this film a few times on my own to get over the initial shock and disappointment.
The funniest dragon I met was in a kid's book I read to my son. Super cute dragon kid Der kleine Drache Kokonuss who goes to school and experiments with things chemistry and whatnot, and asks very many questions, with troubles ahead.
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By accident I watched the first two episodes of Star Trek Voyager yesterday. Rewatched actually, but so much in that I had already forgotten. Neelix hasn't changed, has he.
A snow storm is brewing, as are temperatures clearly below -10C the next few days. I like it, but doggo more frequently complains last few days because grit and ice lumps stick to his paws. I hope colder means this happens less often now.
Also, I modded my Das Keyboard with pudding type keycaps I had bought in an HP yard sale ages ago. Fun! Typing on it now. If you have no idea what this means, it means this:
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Went to Munich 1999 to see the total eclipse. It was a treat, but the place we picked the Hill right near the Olympic Stadium - the sky was was overcast. Anyhow, the Hill was high enough to get a good view of the surroundings.
Seeing everything in sight darken as the 100% totality approached was quite something, shadow everywhere except on the far horizon where the sky looked as normal, blue. The sun was easy enough to see through the cloud cover though, i.e. it wasn't and at the same time in sync with when birds had stopped chirping and all traffic had stopped for a couple minutes. Kinda quiet and surreal.
Except I had Pink Floyd playing in my head the whole time, the tone of Eclipse matched the exhilaration we felt.
All that you touch And all that you see All that you taste All you feel And all that you loved And all that you hate All you distrust All you save ...
The song lasts around 2:13 or so, around the time the phenomenon lasts and a dense time of everything condensed.
Funnily, or not, the blokes that sat in a beer garden in the middle of the city had the best view for the few minutes it lasted. Cloudless sky, 3km from where we were, lucky b*stards.
Hope Moki is fine again! #maltethedog went through handful of days of something, but is back to his cheerful and sneaky self, giving love and wanting you to be friends.
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When you go to a midsized town's square at oddball time of the day you might see this. Hardly any people. On the other upside, all shops are closed. :))
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My former boss was on the Aloha Air flight 243, the one where the top came off mid-flight. (I could not find the right photo, there is one where you can see him sitting in open air class.)
Other than that I've been spared all those compelling mild horror stories you can tell. Thankfully. @Karl Auerbach @Jodi @Muse what the actual... =)
The only time I've felt unsafe, retroactively, was an abrupt jerking course correction miles over the clouds over Siberia heading East that woke me up. A long handful seconds later another China Airlines (Taiwan national carrier) flight came into view at the same height as we were. Gulp.
Mild surprises happened, such as a border guard looking up confused in Turkiye when I greeted saying Merhaba and my passport not matching the expectation whom he would see. Or the border guard at Taoyuan airport who, while I was attuning to all-Mandarin in my head gave context-free instructions "Zeigefinger bitte" in flawless German about which finger to place in the pad for immigration control.
Small talk, I got better at that over the years. The more nerds I met the clearer it became I needed to. This book helped:
Still, breaking the ice can be daunting, since you know they are experts in something, spectrum or not, but what exactly is that. Those early shifts at CCC congress and camp can be real life changers when you discover they felt the same, uneasy and happy to be asked about what exactly it is that you know about.
Heck, but small talk itself is not a very German thing. Many encounters in New York were pleasant, in that people seemed to take the extra 2 seconds or so and try and understand what i wanted or replied. Here, they'd brush you over much quicker and stick to an initial, brusque misunderstanding.
Private calendar, Etar is the Android app of choice, works and syncs. Road to selfhosting this is slow and has been for a while.
In other news, Ralph the all purpose animal was at one point touchy-feely with a giant grandfather clock's inner workings. To help save the world, I gathered. That is quite something. Not having to endure nightmares because of deadlines and things.
FWIW, I do see something in Rod's post, but it is very blurry and looks like an enlarged preview thumbnail. Can't make out a thing, not even if it is a book or what:
in an earlier version of internet, in a literature and creative writing forum people had assembled and planned an RL meet-up in Berlin. However organizer got cold feet, weeks before it started, and asked around, so I ended up having a bunch of teenagers around me for a week. Very much to my own surprise.
Since I had just returned from England myself my head was full of ideas for all the things too, some culture clash involved there too. It was productive and The Group went to poetry slams, a concert, a swim in the lake, and we grew together. Good times.
Rubber ducking is common among IT people and knowledge workers. Same effect as entering a room with experts, beginning to ask them a question.. then stopping, because the answer, an idea, a second round of brain cycles came the second you talked about it. But with a ducky sitting on your desk to talk to aloud in your head.
This classic Werner cartoon shows a version it. Technique works with dogs too. And probably with other cats.
The computer minded people I hang out with oftentimes are, in their entirety, called The Chaos. The term is used as a term of honour. No particular sense of order or orderliness is implied. When mingling, chaos is less suit and tie and more cargo pants and t-shirts. And fishnet see through and all the rainbow too.
A hacker called sushee summarized that nicely in a blog post ca. 2005. if you're a hacker and use chaos as the reason to be unorganized you're holding it wrong.
Me, Id be the more chaotic person in this relationship, in an episodic way. . When recently transitioning from one job to the next, getting an IT equipment zoo in order and sent back was due. .
Boxes, filling material and laptops everywhere. This mildly infuriating state was temporary, fortunately, but too good to not share
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Among Donald Duck and his extended family, Snoopy and Der Superpiep, Garfield was a favourite. The German long title included the phrase "fat, lazy and philosophical". Also, Lasagna! (I noticed I could look up that word I had not heard before, 4th grader me found something related in a dictionary, but adults were sorta out of their wits to explain what it really meant. More reasons to peruse the library. I owe Garfield.)
Today, very Japanese/Taiwanese characters get the spot. Bugcat capoo, Jian Tu (the rabbit), Cony and Brown are a favourite, kawaii to the get no even when they are crying. They live here as two hand-sized plushies, and measure the space that being friends, lovers and the full range of togetherness can fill.
German style belegte Brötchen pales in comparison to most everything similar. You often get no mayonnaise or mustard, butter it is, and 1 other ingredient, ham or salami. Either or. The bare minimalist kind, dry-ish. Parsley on it only if you're lucky.
BMT was unknown as a concept or a placeholder for composition until Subways showed up.
Then again, on the coast you may get Fischbrötchen like the one shown. Fresh from the boat or its sales booth. Raw, or cured fish (herring, mackerel, flatfish, what they caught that morning), onions, mayonnaise, pickled cucumber. This I will recommend.
I have a chile lime salt spread that I will use when attempting my own.
Ein buntes Chaos erwartet Euch, aber das ist nicht exakt wo ihr wohnt. Auf der Karte ist das nicht mehr drauf, Ihr seid also etwas westlich davon untergebracht, und das Theater ist auch gerade außerhalb der Route (großer Stern etwas nach "links oben"). Das wird schon, es dürfte nah genug sein umwas mitzubekommen mit kurzem Fußweg.
Zum Hotel am besten über Franklinstraße und Salzufer, also nördlich der Spree bleiben. Das sollte ohne große Beeinträchtigung gehen.
We have Aldi here, but what Trader Joe's they have is sub par quality. My wife brought the Everything but the Bagel sesame blended with salt jar from New York. Kind of addictively good on many things. Unavailable here.
My other favourite spice is a blend, Harissa. Chili, salt, paprika, cumin, dried tomato (I think) and whatnot. Elevates most tomato sauces, a pinch of it loves to be on a plate of Hummus bi tahina.
The admin/podmin/maintainer of pixelfed.automat.click (@billyidl) ran into technical trouble, the server's TLSv1 asks for but does not receive a known name. Nothing I can do to fix it, I offered help which may not have reached them, so only they can. Fedi dynamics!
It will be fine soon. I sure hope I can add more photos later when automat.click is up again.
Until @billyidl makes that happen here's more Chacha for you:
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Samsung? I just heard the founder once went to Sanyo, the Japanese giant, as an apprentice. Only when competition took up did the partnership split, in 1974, and Samsung was on its own. Asianometry has the details.
Dog story? Years before Malte came along this little fella named Chacha introduced us to the idea of maybe possibly one day having a dog of our own. Our holiday dog. What that could be like we learned from him. Chacha the dog did dog things: run around, demand we play with him, cunningly open doors to the pantry, eat all the things when we weren't looking, and rest together with his favourite humans when the time had come. Zzzz... such a cutie. #dogsusingpillows #dogs #hunde #dogsofmastodon #dogsofpixelfed #dogsofthefediverse #fedidogs #dogsoffriendica
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Days after this post I had a first-time encounter, the constellation was new and very exciting for me. Why? Because doggo was off leash, very much out of reach and a sounder of boar crossed the path in front of him.
Three photos in that post - on the first you can see a very happy Golden dashing of towards the background, into the kinda dark part of the forest, because his favourite lake is there. Like excited, flying ears and all. Then he stopped, I saw why.
So story time. Forest lake trip one early morning. An unleashed #MalteTheDog runs ahead, bubbling with excitement; the lake waits where this path ends. But. Next photos, something stepped onto the same path. Being two leash lengths ahead of me, there was no good way of stopping him. To my relief he stopped by himself, some 15-20m or so away from their path, fascinated by the alpha boar and the sounder that followed, around two dozen piggies and piglets overall. Was I relieved nothing else happened! Once they had crossed doggo ran off for lake time. Good boy!
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This city's official mascot is the Bear, not often in the LGBTQ style but all over the place as Buddy Bears. Friendly, colourful bears in about life size, either upright or on all fours, adorned with a local motif, kid's art, by a paid artists or embassy emblems because often the bears grace their entrance.
Other than that, an icon is the East Berlin TV tower. Not an animal, but it is ev-ery-whe-re in logos, silhouettes, and whatnot.
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The other chapter to Berlin is, when the current airport was being planned 3 effing decades ago, it had not yet spawned its own genre of jokes, but the initial plan was to extend a given subway line first (handful of km extra, no big deal, connectivity for cheap) so it would be ready when the thing opened.
Part of the joke is the construction companies deliberately delayed getting the airport right so the subway could acually be ready in time for the opening, but... ummm no. Instead we have ride dealers convincing clueless tourists inside the terminal to book an all inclusive 60€ private minivan ride into the city when the common train service is just two storey below the main terminal and one journey would be 4,20€. Sigh.
The new head of our local transportation authority just last week said "service reliability and network stability above all else. Oh, and we are indeed still planning for the subway extension to the airport" - ask me again in a couple years if there was progress. Normal trains will do in the meantime and new connections are up very soon, for real.
There was a local storm and that also brought about advance warnings yesterday. I noticed since the dog came in from the balcony, looking unexpectedly excited, and moments later diagonal rain and storm started, slamming windows in the neighbourhood and displacing stuff on balconies and window sills.
Reports say gusts were up to 100km/h (around 60mph). Where I was that storm lasted around 10-15 minutes, bringing summer street life to a standstill as everybody out tried to get out of the way. There was minor damage from fallen trees, a couple cars were hit, and overground transportation networks were stopped.
So last night and today weather is much cooler, around 20C only, down from 35C yesterday. The streets are being cleared from fallen branches and debris from flower pots. Public transportation has restarted mostly, but I think there were more people on bikes than usual.
Dog walkers we met this morning had wild stories to tell about how their dogs reacted to the situation. Ours was fine.
