Week 21, 2023

I know it is Monday. But it is also a public holiday 🙏🏻 so guess what? That’s still the weekend.

The working part of the week was pretty uneventful, so there’s not much to be said.

On Saturday we had a family trip to Staufen, a lovely little town nearby which you might know from this Tom Scott video for some not so love little reasons. We do have quite a lot of family history there, so during the tour we basically had two guides – the official one who told us about the town’s history all the way from the middle ages and then my dad who told us about the shenanigans my family got up to in the town back in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Yesterday I finally managed to get Passkeys working on the weeknotes website. It’s still a bit wonky, so I guess I’ll have to dig a bit deeper until I can run around telling people I know how to properly implement it. I guess like all of those things it will feel very obvious once I do understand how everything fits together but for now, I’m still a bit confused.

This morning my alarm went of – I forgot to switch it off for the public holiday. And instead of being grumpy about it in bed, I decided to be grumpy about it in the forest.

Pants!

Or to be more precise: a short review of the the Adidas Go To Commuter pants.

As far as I can remember I’ve been (like most guys, probably) a jeans guy. Maybe shorts in the warmer parts of summer, but besides that, jeans it is. At some point in the last couple of years while working from home I noticed that there might be more comfortable things to wear when mostly sitting at the computer or running around one’s own apartment. I did some (not much, to be honest) research and got myself a bunch of inexpensive cotton “yogi” pants.
They work great for me, because they’re light, they still give me the impression of wearing clothes and they have pockets, which I need even at home.
But – and it is a big but – they are very much not in a style that I would wear outside. Where people can see me. I’m neither a yoga person nor a I-want-to-look-like-I’m-a-yoga-person person. I don’t meditate and I don’t have incense burning in a corner while listening to gamelan.[1] So now we have a problem. Over the years I’ve been getting very used to the comfort of these pants and suddenly wearing jeans wasn’t fun at all.

So I do what people like me do: I started to do “research” (reading reddit, mostly) to find some alternative. And this is how I found the Adidas Go To Commuter pants. Officially they’re made for golfing, which I don’t do, but with a name like commuter pants and positive reviews I pretty much decided that they’re probably comfortable pants that are still acceptable at an office. (Because that’s where people commute to, right?) So I ordered them and turns out: they’re not what I was looking for.

Even though they’re always shown in business casual in the marketing material and are meant to be worn with a belt, in reality they’re very obviously sports wear. There can be no doubt about it. The look and the material (and therefore the sounds) – there’s no denying it.
They’re very good sports wear and I guess in most offices (including where I work) they’re acceptable nowadays, but sadly: not for me. I can’t cosplay being a sports person, just because I happen to own these pants.

I guess I’ll just have to do what millions of men before me have done and just go to a real life men’s outfitter and get some proper pants instead of trusting the internet. Ugh.
Or maybe instead I start randomly ordering pants from DTC brands off Instagram? That might be fun, too.

That does actually sound like something I might do, but that’s not the point. ↩

Morning Earworm #19: I Ran

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.

This morning it was I Ran by A Flock of Seagulls

Week 20, 2023

This was a short week – Ascension Thursday is a public holiday here and on Friday I celebreated the good old tradition of Brückentag and took the day off. For quite a while it seemed like it wasn’t such a good idea – the weather looked like it would turn out to be a bit shit, so it would basically end up being me wasting a day off on moping around at home. And I can do that for free on the weekends, thank you very much.
I did some shopping as soon as the shops opened on that day and when that was done way too fast, there was still quite a lot of day left. So I decided to go somewhere where I haven’t been since the early 90s: the Grand Ballon in the French Vosges mountains. It’s about an hour drive, the last half an hour is a pretty spectacular (and frankly dangerous) small country road through the Alsace forest up the mountain, shared with many cyclists, bikers and RVs.

It was pretty fun to walk the short one-hour hiking trail from the car park, ambling around in my “civilian” clothes in the middle of geared-up serious hikers, who probably did a big multi-day Vosges hike.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much spend in front of the TV – the 24 hour race at the Nürburgring is happening this weekend and that’s always something I like to watch. Some day I might even make it there in person.

“Someone bought the thing you liked and killed it” is the defining experience of the 21st century.
D an Broo ks

Morning Earworm #18: Giri Giri

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.

This morning it was Giri Giri by ATARASHII GAKKO! (Okay, I’m cheating a bit here – I had this earworm since the album came out a while ago, but today they posted that practice video, so here we go.)

Week 19, 2023

It’s early[1] on a Sunday morning, I’m sitting here with my coffee at the computer, stare at the text editor and think to myself: hm.

The biggest hm this week was probably a therapist appointment I had on Thursday.
Before I move on – we’re all friends here and perpetually online and therefore are comfortable talking openly about this stuff, right? If not, you’re free to leave, thank you very much.

Great, anyway. As astute readers of my blog know, I’ve been looking into getting some help with my mental health. Just like seemingly everybody on the internet, I do find myself nodding along to lists of ADHD symptoms, so I had decided to venture out into the wild and see if there’s a professional to either confirm my suspicion or tell me what else might be happening. Everybody who has ever tried to do this in Germany might know that this is an almost impossible task – most therapists are booked out for months, if not years in advance.
I finally managed to get a booking for three assessment appointments and I was quite elated – I figured I’d get some kind of onboarding experience for my mental health journey, tell the doctor a bit about my life, answer questions and voilá, more clarity.

Readers, this is not what happened. Instead if was frankly the weirdest doctor experience I had in the 40+ years of my life. And I went to the army doctor whose cure for everything were heat patches.
I mostly had to defend my vocabulary choices (roughly half an hour went to a discussion that I used the term “I learned by osmosis” even though I am not a biologist. wtf) and the fact that I had a pretty good childhood.
And in the end, after I talked about my many unfinished things, my inability to judge time and how I keep forgetting the existence of things, tasks and people unless they’re right there in my face and all the emotional turmoil these facts and their consequences bring to me, the doctor basically said that therapy wouldn’t help me because they can’t detect emotional turmoil and it can’t be ADHD because I don’t fidget or walk around.
Uhm. Okay. Thanks for nothing, I guess.

And oh, there’s a new beta of Diablo 4, but it’s the same content as the first one. And no, I didn’t get the new Zelda game.
So how was your week?

as in: Soon after I got up. Not early as in early. ↩

Morning Earworm #17: No Rain

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.

This morning it was No Rain by Blind Melon.

Week 18, 2023

I frankly don’t have anything exciting to tell this week. I went for a nice long walk after work on the one evening we had warm weather, that’s basically it. It’s finally warm enough to sleep with an open window, which is great during the night (oxygen!) and sucks in the morning. (construction noise)
This is it. Look at my friends’ weeknotes instead, they’re linked underneath this post. (If you look at this post in a browser. If you read this in a feed reader: Hi! I like you! But I’ll probably not add the feed notes box in my feed.)

Morning Earworm #16: Azzurro

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.

This morning it was Azzurro by Adriano Celentano.

After two hours of sleep my body decided it had enough last night and was pretty adamant that it should now be awake. Only when the sun was already out and I was getting ready for work it remembered that two hours of sleep are not enough.
This is going to be a fun day.

Week 17, 2023

This week went fast again – just when I started to realize that it started, it’s already Sunday and I’m here, trying to think of what to write.

When clicking around on meetup.com a few days back I learned of Shut Up & Write and saw that there’s weekly events of them nearby. The idea is to basically meet somewhere semi-calm, bring some material for writing and then just do that – timeboxed to an hour. Given that I want to blog more (see also: these week notes) I decided to give the whole thing a chance. It also gets me out of the house on a Saturday morning, which can only be a good thing.
The result was my post on Bluesky FOMO yesterday. So yeah, deciding what to write about, writing it, looking up a bunch of links, doing some light editing and posting it took pretty much exactly the allotted hour. I might just make it part of my Saturday morning routine. We’ll see.
(The FOMO has cooled down considerably from it’s already not too hot state, in case anyone was wondering.)

So, here we are. A calm-ish week. (I’ll probably think of roughly a hundred things I could have mentioned the moment I click publish, but oh well.)

There is nothing dumber than FOMO for skeets

In the beginning I wasn’t too interested in whatever Bluesky might be – the whole idea of yet another social network by the same people who ran Twitter into the ground wasn’t too enticing. And with my enthusiasm for the principles of the IndieWeb I was quite happy to look at Mastodon again when it was clear that Twitter wasn’t the place for me anymore and that I was looking for something besides blogs and my feed reader.
So I am happily posting there, untroubled by all the things that people don’t like about it – I don’t have a problem with the idea of different instances and I’m not super interested in search, “discovery” or following celebrities.[1] As long as “my people” are around and I can get the kind of ambient intimacy that has been the main reason for my love for the web, I’m content.[2] I’m not looking for “speech and reach” I’m looking for community[3].

But of course at some point fomo hits.
While I don’t really care about being an early adopter of these things anymore, I also don’t not care. When I read an article like the amazing Beamer Dressman Bodybag and I see an absolutely unhinged phrase like “emu lesbian finally milkshake ducked,” it does tickle the part of my brain that likes to be in on the joke. In a good way when I understand the phrase, in a not so good way when I don’t.
And now that I am not on bluesky, I am not in on the joke and it bums me out. Worse than that: it bums me out on a meta level. I’m annoyed that it bums me out. I really don’t want to use that app. Everything I read about it sounds like something that makes my life better by not being in it. And yet.

So I hid my question for an invitation in a little jokey post, well aware how dumb and desperate it is[4] to ask for these things.
Oh well. The weather is nice, at least for the next couple of hours, so I guess I should go for a walk and rather look at the real blue sky for a while.

I’m not above it, either. Once in a while it is entertaining to read what they have to say. Plus they often post selfies and they tend to be attractive people and who doesn’t like to see that on their feed once in a while? ↩
As in happy. Not as in something being created for consumption. ↩
This is probably a whole other blog post. ↩
Maybe not is. But at least looks. ↩

Week 16, 2023

Back once again for the weeknotes post. Hi!

Dear reader, this was a fun week. beyond Tellerrand was interesting, hanging out with coworkers in a new-ish context was great, the food in Düsseldorf was as good as expected and all in all those were two good days, capped on Tuesday by a great dinner with Alex and Teymur.

I got up pretty early on Tuesday morning and walked around Düsseldorf for a while, especially in the area where I used to stay and Königsallee and it was interesting to see changes since I moved away. I do admit that I was quite surprised how much I missed the place. Maybe it was just the early morning but walking around there sure put me in a wistful melancholy.

Wednesday and Thursday flew by – I stayed in Cologne to go to the office and faster than I could understand I was back home. Friday and Saturday were nothing to write home about.
And today it was a family trip again – those things tend to happen in spring and this time we went to the Préhisto-Parc in the Jura (of Jurassic fame) mountain rage. It’s a cute little place to visit, we mostly picked it for the children but in the end they were more interested in running around while we grown-ups enjoyed the dinosaurs.

My Symfony router woes

I’m mostly posting this so that someone can contact me and say: Dude, you’re a numpty, that’s all very easy.

A few weeks back I said that I am thinking of writing my own router for Symfony and Andrew pointed out that it might be a good idea to write down why.
I’m currently looking at semi-dynamic sub-domain and domain routing. Basically I want to be able to do what WordPress multisite is able to do: have one big monolithic (yes, yes, I know) application that has the main interface at example.com, user spaces on user.example.com and as a bonus have the application be able to handle domains mapped to these user spaces, too.

To make things a bit harder – all of these domains and subdomains cannot be hardcoded, because the software is supposed to run as different instances in multiple locations.

I think most of it is possible with some configuration magic, but I haven’t quite cracked the nut, how. (To be honest, I didn’t dig in much deeper since my original post, but the requirements are still around.)

Maybe I’m missing something and you have a great and simple solution? You can send me a comment via webmention, copy the URL of this post into you mastodon search and reply there or just send me an email: dschwind@lostfocus.de