The happy place

This here is the space into which I put some of the thoughts which have been gathering inside my head. Mostly mundane stuff as I am not that original

Enjoying the weather outside alot the temperature doesn’t feel anything. 18°c is the Optimum temperature.

Listening to Rammstein because it it’s semi angry music which fits my mood perfectly. The lewd lyrics a don’t feel quite right, however, considering them being in some sex scandal I’m not too familiar with. Fleischgewehr is still a funny word to use.

I did mow the lawn and ah, yes, there was another round of layoffs during my vacation, don’t think there’ll be anyone left except the Indians hired to replace us. They seem like nice enough people. It just is all fucked up.

I sure don’t regret my decision to leave even though it was a tough call to make.

It wasn’t tough at all.

I’m the one who’s tough, sitting in the optimum weather listening to Rammstein singing about „Blitzkrieg mit dem Fleischgewehr“.

It feels good to be sad sometimes to let the feelings out through your eyes and thus decrease the pressure somewhat.

I’ve eaten nachos today. I’ve got mixed feelings about nachos: they taste good but also they taste bad.

I was back at work today and it was just as boring as I remember it. Went straight from cloud SQL dashboard into terraform and now there’s a Postgres database which we’re gonna put the schema on tomorrow. Progress is slow because I’ve got a low motivation.

I’ve neglected the lawn which needs mowing. I’ll do that tomorrow.

maybe.

That’s all I can think of right now. I’ll write something better tomorrow

maybe.

I promise

All is well.

The topics on my mind are such that they are uncomfortable to write about and to think about.

First one is my sister has ghosted me and turns out to be very strange in a bad way.

Second one is the end of vacation which feels ok, because there are three more weeks and then I start the new one., but it makes me think of my job about to quit: I quit the old one because I do not like at all the way they laid my friends off during a big recession, and even though of course they were related, it still was done badly and in a very bad way. They should’ve fired the new boss instead, who thinks he has to explain to us the difference between work and family (it’s the pay he says). I don’t enjoy seeing my friends getting fired, some of them had worked there for decades, loyally guiding the office through hardships, going above and beyond and whatnot being rewarded for their loyalty with a severance package. I value loyalty and friends a lot and therefore I felt the need to take my top performance elsewhere, even though it pays less, because money isn’t everything and I can afford to be poorer.

Anyhow: Both of these things have been sources of anxiety and I think it was cruel of my sister to just exclude me from her life because I’ve been struggling to keep our relationship alive for years and feel like an idiot that it took me this long to realise that she don’t want anything to do with me.

I don’t like to feel like an idiot when I’m fact I’m of at least around average intelligence.

I’m in a pleasant mood. There was this hunk of aged goat cheese which I ate a while ago which I’m feeling in the inside of my stomach right now: It’s like a small candle of happiness burning in there even after eaten. That’s pretty spectacular.

Cheese is a great invention with many uses and variations, (arguably even more versatile than the potato because you can eat it with or without mold. (Potato gratin is a perfect five star dish: a union of the best of the animal world and the best vegetable.))

I was setting up a new iPad today, it’s an experience which makes me very angry for all the hoops and authentications and of course I’ve forgotten my password and of course the new one I set could not have three consecutive numbers and it can’t have all caps either. Then also the two factor authentication got stuck in a loop making me angrier with each iteration. Sitting staring down on that fool thing feeling like some super idiot waiting for it to complete the various stuff and the end it’s much like the old iPad except with an USB-C connector and it can actually charge so there’s that.

It’s been like you can tell a very contrast rich day: first that debacle with the iPad and now this cheese experience.

I’ve been considering playing wow classic with that friend from my youth I was writing about earlier. I love playing as a healer. I love healing people. Healing, healing and resurrecting them if need be. I used to be a resto shaman: a troll with a big blue nose and tusks, but my friend and his friend (who is also my old friend) play alliance and I’ve always, always played as horde so it could be too big of a leap for me. We shall see. Like why would anyone want to play alliance when you can be a troll with tusks riding a raptor in barrens?

Finally I’ve spent most time these days building that thing and I really love carpentry and all of the power tools and saws which I do use even though I see on them how insanely dangerous they are. It’s funny to me how I use more mathematics when building than I do when programming for a living?!

Once many years ago, in a previous chapter of my life, there was summer outside; sun shining pleasantly on the streets of the city in which I dwelled at the time.

For some reason I was tasked with setting up a HA FTP solution for some niche client need which I need not detail here, but I wanted an active/active setup because active/passive is a thing which I will always avoid if possible, because in my experience the one time you get to try whether the standby service is actually working is when the active one has failed. Unless of course you write runbooks on confluence which describes routines for regularly failing over in a controlled manner or some shit like that. I don’t like it.

So anyways I was of course something of a key person being as I am, a very (some would say) skilled sysadmin, so there was a high demand on my expertise and to fight the stress associated with the intense workload I regularly went to fitness classes. Preferably fitness dancing as I am somewhat of a dance savant in that I become one with the music. I love the fitness music it can be that song with Katy Perry; something something rythm or chandelier by Sia it something like that which I just love.

Anyway as I was dancing there, one with the music, suddenly it was like God himself from out of nowhere said to me to set the PASV port ranges differently on the ftp servers, and mirror that config in HAProxy and then that’s all there is to it.

Of course that might seem self evident, but the cool thing was that like I said it came out of nowhere and I had a similar revelation yesterday when looking at the new chicken coup extension: paint it like the chicken coup from which it protrudes, except the other way around: make the red things green, the green things white and the white things red.

We’ll see how it looks but it’s probably gonna look great.

The lamps we bought to put on the headboards for reading look like tentacles and now the bed looks like a slug.

I found a very beautiful feather today, fully grown and with a gleam reminding of an oil spill.

I finally quit my job will see hope it was received when I’m back from vacation week after next.

I’m putting the roof on that thing I was talking about before; the de luxe chicken coup.

I love pouring concrete, feeling like a dwarven engineer.

I didn’t sleep this night, but I’m alive.

I did try, but first I got some asthma coughs which woke me up like a fancy type of reminder to take the medicine. Furthermore my wife was snoring in such a way that it sounded just like the cat wanted out. But there was no cat when I got down to see, instead I saw that it was bright outside.

The beginning of a nice day.

Then finally a few hours later indeed the cat did want to go out and it sounded just like it did before.

Indeed.

Now instead of sleeping I’m thinking about a lot of stuff like I’m thinking about all of the stuff at the same time again. Happy thoughts mingled with worries and sad ones like a mix of so many different things, more like a sausage than a fruit salad.

Anyhow I’ve not much more to say; no great revelations or profound wisdoms to share unfortunately.

Now I’ll go try again to sleep, with the birds chirping and all of the bright light everywhere and the head I am not too sure I’ll succeed.

Probably I’ll fall asleep sooner or later

Hello friends and enemies!

I’m feeling like good and bad and I’ll go for a jog on a track I ain’t jogged for a long time, cause maybe it’ll do me some good for all the bad it feels while doing it.

It’s like I got this thunderstorm inside, ready to smite. Feeling a bit on edge: Somewhat unsettled about my future. Need to straighten my feelings and thoughts out, cause it’s chaos in there right now.

Need to brush my teeth.

I don’t wanna die.

I love this life, and I cling to it.

I’ve found a new favourite Britney Spears track.


Now I’ve jogged for 10km and it felt horrible just as I knew it would 👍, just like it always does.

Now everything feels good, the problems melted away.

Just like they always do.

Now the cat is asleep in my lap. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff lately which I won’t go into great detail about here, but everything is well. And that’s great. Great indeed. I am alive, just like any Solaris 10 machine would be able to confirm were they able to ping me.

Once when I was administrating Solaris 10 systems (among other things), we went the last day before my vacation to play some badminton. It was a 2v2 game, so I felt I needed to participate even though I felt in my systems what could be the beginning of a slight cold. One in the opposing team was superior and was playing the ball in such a way that I had to run the longest way always to catch the next one, which I frequently failed with, even though I gave it all I got (I always do it like that even though I don’t care much if I win it not).

When we were done and were going on the subway for some beers at the end of the day, I wasn’t feeling quite right, so instead I went back home and fell asleep and was knocked out abed for the whole first week of my vacation.

That just goes to show that even smart people do dumb things.

And dumb people do too.

Today (or rather yesterday, as it’s 00:05), during lunch, I was told after eating and when we were on our way to the car, that there was this child at the buffet who wasn’t allowed by her parents to eat meat balls with cream and jam, and we all that that a damn shame. They served meat balls and pancakes and more besides but apparently those were to be eaten separately almost like separate activities for some reason I don’t understand as it’ll all be mingled in the stomach; the order in which eaten makes little difference.

My aunt for some reason thought that the child would get eating disorders, but my concern was that they were putting out her creative fire and natural curiosity by forcing her to be dull and think inside the box. I further thought that the exact opposite of what a parent is supposed to do: I think a good parent will always feed the fire and encourage curiosity as she might be raising an explorer or scientist or engineer or whatever.

I thought then about this quote from Clive Barker’s Abarat books:

We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.

This I think about a lot and hold it to be one hundred percent true as I’ve had similar thoughts myself and often feel like parts of me die inside after similar encounters.

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