My November ‘23 in Review

It’s that time of the month again for a new recap. November has passed, so let’s see what happened in the last 30 days…

The month started unusually and uneventfully. There was a weekend in Braunschweig, where I finally switched my internet connection to the new 5G solution. Successful. The old solution would actually still work until March, but it’s better to check in advance if everything is working.

Mid-month, things got more unusual. I was called into a task force at work. Since our team is functioning smoothly, and we are productive, we are now helping out another team. It goes to the extent that even weekend work is on the table. However, I’ve managed to fend that off successfully in the past two weeks and hope it won’t be necessary in the future. After 5 days of exceeding the scheduled work hours, I’m not keen on sacrificing one of my two days off a week for extra work without additional compensation. I’m aware that I’m in a privileged position, but a good work-life balance is crucial to me.

The demanding days also have the effect that I’m not very motivated for hobby programming after work. I had actually started integrating Henrique’s library for MicroPub into GoBlog to replace my own, not very clean solution. But that will have to wait until the task force is over, and hobby programming brings me more joy than it currently does.

On one of the weekends where I could avoid Saturday work, I went to Strasbourg with my girlfriend. A short vacation to make up for the uncompleted summer vacation. It was very nice; we explored the old town, ate crêpes and tarte flambée, and also visited the European Parliament.

On the other weekend, we visited my family and celebrated my mother’s birthday. Because the German railway decided to have a major construction site on the day of our return journey, we used a rental car (the first time I booked a rental car – apart from car-sharing, of course). And I can’t say it any other way, even if the train is delayed, traveling by train is more relaxed. You can use the time during the journey, even if it’s just watching videos. In the car, you have to stay continuously focused on the road and the other road users.

Yesterday was the company location’s Christmas party. Even though I’m not the biggest fan of such events, sometimes it’s nice to see colleagues from the company, especially those from other projects, and exchange ideas. Yesterday, I learned that there might be a possibility to use an Enterprise ChatGPT version for work. Let’s see if I can soon delegate some annoying parts of programming to AI.

Tomorrow would be my father’s birthday, the seventh one we can’t celebrate with him. But at least tomorrow, I will visit the cemetery.

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