First week at my new government job! Genuinely feel like I made the right decision, at least based on first impressions. The biggest downside is that the standard deviation on my 90 minute commute is, like, 45 minutes. But the people are nice and I have some interesting things to work on, much more in the realm of bicycle infrastructure and traffic safety than before. The biggest thing I need to get used to is probably the pace of things. I'm used to hit the ground running and a pretty fast pace. But discussing my work today I went "so you have just one urgent thing for me? how urgent is urgent?" and the answer was "well we need something by the end of January, how about we decide on the roadmap in two weeks". (Not that I'm complaining! This is what I wanted.)
Handed in my work stuff on Monday. I start the new gig Sept 4th so now I have a luxorious 5 weeks of freedom slash unemployment. Most of that time will be spent on a long list of DIY in and around the house, but I'm also making an effort to meet a bunch of friends and family who I haven't spoken to in a while. We also got solar yesterday! Five panels pointing east and five pointing west. The weather today was very cloudy and stormy, but they seem to be working great; I got a nice flat energy generation profile out of my panels which (at least today) matched my own energy profile quite well. The blue is all the energy I was able to directly use; green is generation, purple/pink is what I still needed to draw from the grid.
I'm doing...okayish. Have more good days than bad ones. Had to skip the company ski trip, for obvious reasons, but the fomo is real. Currently waiting for a few blood test results. In the meantime I'm trying to figure out what makes the good days good. Monday I learned the hard way that waking up before 7am royally f'ed up my day. I'm looking at vegan protein shakes because keeping energy levels up seems to work. Got an Apple Watch to monitor my heart rate and learn what that does. Avoiding 'spikes' of effort also seems to help. I am intensely grateful to own a car right now because I cannot see myself bicycling the amount I used to do all the time. To some degree I am weaponizing my slightly obsessive nature to manage my own health. But I have to keep reminding myself however that my health is not entirely in my hands, that it could be a lot worse, that I have to be patient, that I have to cut myself some slack. Easier said than done though.
It's now almost been an year since my long-covid-ish inducing covid. My recovery was slow over the summer but steady, so I thought I was essentially over it by now. I can do my 4 mile bike commute without trouble and have fairly active days quite regularly. Last week however I went for a nice walk for the first time in a while, and it wrecked me with an all too familiar soreness and lethargy the two days after. Went for another shorter walk yesterday, similar issues today. Getting to terms with the fact that I might need help is such a hard thing to do.
The new home is fan-tas-tic. The neighborhood is quiet and green, we now have a GARDEN which is lovely (even though it'll stay 90% bricks until we tackle that project next year), and I get to bicycle everywhere through lush parks. After a lot of work, most of our stuff and furniture is now where it needs to be. The only two downsides are that money is evaporating at unforeseen rates and that the previous owner was good at fixing up rooms? But his pipework around the boiler was described today as 'dangerously amateurish'. $300 just to fix it so it's safe to operate... Opened my work email today for the first time in 5 weeks. I did a good enough job of handing shit over that I had 250 emails to breeze through of which only a dozen still require action.
Glad to hear you're still alive and kicking, pabs! I don't know how far back you'd wanna hear, but in the past years I got out of college and into my first job where I'm now working on all sorts of sustainable mobility consultancy projects. My schtick is crystallizing into "how can we use data analytics to make better mobility systems". Did a bunch of work around EVs and moving more into shared mobility recently. Together with one other colleague, I created the model to predict the Dutch fastcharging network demand for the next decade that will be the foundation of a lot of plans in the next year's. I found the love of my life. She moved in February 2020. We weathered that storm well and have just bought our first home, which we've been moving into for just a few days ago. It's fan-tas-tic. I'm writing this from my phone while on holiday with her wonderful family in the south of France. This year I also got a bout of long COVID in early March, which is now 90% gone but not 100%.
In just over a week we'll be the proud owner of our first home! Super excited. It's really fun, even though it's stressful. Boxes are a rising invasive species in our apartment at the moment. I have the luxury of taking 5 weeks PTO to move and take a quick break in southern France mountains. (My comp is such that I get 6 weeks per year and can buy up to 4 weeks extra for less than my day rate. I also learned today that I get two extra days PTO just for moving! It's generous, even for Europeans, as my SO is less lucky.) Now that I'm one of those lucky millennials with a home ("in this economy?!") I get to bother myself with problems like the imminent gas crisis. I'm still on the fence whether I want to prep and buy heaters. The new variable price energy contract I have to take has rates that are 422% of what they were a year or two ago (3.38 instead of 0.80 euro / m3). I'm expecting them to rise to 5 or 6 euro. Ideally I'd renovate my house to be full electric and maximize solar. Getting any contractor now however is nearly impossible and they're all going for "fuck you we're busy" rates. Heat pumps have waitlists of over a year in some cases too. So this winter there's probably only room for low hanging fruit improvements.
how is it possible that "emergency root canal treatment" only barely makes the top 5 of things that absolutely suck about my week this week
The past week has been f'n all over the place. Busy as hell, stressed out, finding a moment of peace, then stressed again. Spending a day with family, then finding out grandpa is on death's door. Covid scare, presentation stress. Highs and lows. I'm holding on but barely.
The last few weeks have been a bit rocky from time to time, but things are going fairly well now. Just came back from a wonderful walk in the woods and on the heather with a good friend, which was followed by a pretty fantastic one-on-one coaching session. A few weeks ago I decided that I needed career advice from someone skilled, so that I can be happier in my work, as I've been struggling to find the next step to take in my career. HR was open to that idea, so I'm not even paying for it. The session was two hours of candid conversation, almost a therapy session in how deep it went. I can't remember the last time I've been so vulnerable with someone I've previously talked to less than an hour, but I had no reservations in giving my whole self. The conversation made me realize just how wide and deep my interests and skills are, which is something that feels natural to me but really isn't. I'm not a "T-shaped professional", I'm more of a rake. Or like a really thick Swiss army knife. It reminded me how much I like to be building bridges between things - between people and ideas, between technology and people, between problem and solution. It feels good to re-evaluate my work-related values and work on myself with someone who asks the right questions. The past year has felt...unrewarding on that front. Something I had a lot of fun with the past week was help mr. watch-amacallit (aka kleinbl00) by building a landing page for his watch biz. I very much played the part of "nah, we're not paying you to build a website, I have a nephew who can smash something together". The result's turned out pretty great I think.
A player in my D&D group wants to run a oneshot which may or may not become a campaign. Another player and I decided to weave our backstories together, and the DM came up with the idea to run a prologue, so now we're doing asynchronous D&D in a Whatsapp group chat and I love it.
The cynic and pessimist in me worries that I'm of a generation that, whether they admit it or not, has given up on believing in changing the structures of power for the better. Whenever the topic of pensions happens comes up amongst my peers, the most common reaction is to simply not believe we'll ever get to see it happen. Pensions! What a concept. Climate change, social progress, saving democracy; we have a percentage of the population willing to stand for a better future and peacefully protest, but I worry the majority has given up on changing the fundamentals of power. Instead, we burst out and take down instances of a problem. We take down a handful of hedge funds, but can't fathom saving the middle class. We have Gamergate and #metoo, but can't seem to implement even the simplest quotas and still have to teach college (!) aged dudebros the simplest definition of consent. It's not like there aren't solutions that work - I for one would welcome a rebirth of social-democratic politics - but I'm worried my generation isn't going to (be able to) put the work behind it to reverse the course, to tackle the root of the issues instead of chopping yet another imperfect branch.But we've just moved a generation from Polti 9 - "I want to make money"- to Polti 3: "I am a mutherfucking suicide bomber."
Not my best week. Tired, sick of things, hard to muster the energy to do hard things. Difficult conversations at work two days in a row, so today I cancelled my last few meetings and went on a two hour bike ride. That helped. But I wish I didn’t need recovery tricks like that.
Hey everyone! Haven't been here as often as I'd like lately. I don't read as much articles anymore on the web, I haven't read anything nonfiction in months because I just can't care for it so much these days. Which means I have much less to share and fewer reasons to venture here. I know it's not the sole reason for being here, far from it, but it is often the spark for me and there haven't been as many sparks as of late. Hm. I just got great news at work; I'm gonna be starting a secondment (if that's the correct word for working for another organization for my expertise) after my holiday. Means a big step forward; I like creating/designing and doing data analysis, but if I can delegate the data legwork I won't miss it. So this new thing is the first one where I'm not touching a single line of code or data, instead being asked to work together with others and create / set up pilot projects for others to then go and do. It also enables me to yeet a bunch of projects I don't want to do anymore because I will definitely not have time to be spread thinly anymore, thank you very much. Plus the organization I'm starting at has a phenomenal network of people in the field of sustainable / innovative transportation.
A good week on paper - finally got to see my sister's baby again. Handed in my revised manuscript. Canoed in the canals. But the line between work and life is fully blurred, and I don't feel like I've got the energy to deal with my responsibilities, despite how few there are. Things are too vague, too uncertain, too unbounded right now and I'm having none of it.
I posted a map on Twitter yesterday, and now I'm gonna be in the local newspaper tomorrow! Huzzah. I calculated the centroid of all the households in my city over time to see how the population shifts, and apparently that's fun enough to feature there. Including a photo op where I push measuring tape on the street because how on earth are you otherwise gonna make a tidbit of data analysis into a photo. Cheesy af but who cares, it was fun to do. Went to the office yesterday for the first time since mid-February. The numbers are going pretty good over here - we're at less than 5 hospitalizations per day for the past weeks. So slowly and steadily. It was good to go back there. Today I took the day off, so it feels like Saturday to me. I have as much paid off days left as there are weeks in the year, so I'm planning to work less and am starting that with taking Wednesdays or Thursdays off. Love it so far.
Woah, this is phenomenal. It has local stations from my hometown I've never even heard of. Radio is dead, long live radio.
I'm in a bus to Edinburgh Airport. After more worrying news on Monday, we decided yesterday to get the hell out of here. I think it was kb who said that one shouldn't travel to places where you can't afford to spend six weeks, and that haunting prospect in combination with the lackluster UK government approach pushed me first into a mild panic, then into action. This pandemic is very good at hitting all of my fear buttons. I've been worried about developing symptoms, am still worried about a last minute cancellation, and I don't think I'll stop being worried until I set foot on home ground. But it's lessening by the minute with the airport in sight.
Woww. That's such an obscenely large amount of money that k cannot help but worry about the size of the problem it's trying to avail. To help put it into perspective, I quite like the staircase analogy that I came across recently on Reddit: HALF of people in the united states are on the base or the very 1st step. Almost 200 million people who can't even get one step up in this system. Those with more money than 90% of fellow Americans, millionaires who we consider our upper-middle class professional class and live more than comfortably, are on the 11th step. A few more seconds of walking up from that previous middle-class step. Most Americans won't even come close to accumulating this much over an entire lifetime of working. [...] Jeff Bezos? He's so high up it only makes sense to describe his staircase in distance. His stairs take him up 133 miles. That's more than halfway to the space station. That's more than 24 consecutive Mt. Everest's stacked on top of each other. It would take walking, non-stop, no sleep, over two weeks to ascend that high, each single step worth more than five poverty-level families in America combined. Every 36 hours, a Bezos staircase is pumped into the economy.I like to use the analogy of a staircase, with each step on the staircase representing $100,000 of net worth. That's several years of working wages saved up for tens of millions of Americans.
Drove the panda car to my parents last Friday. Got the newer 33 kWh (~150 mi range) version, so I made it there without charging along the way. We spent Saturday visiting the oldest known planetarium in the world. It's old-old: it was under construction when the Declaration of Independence was written. Both my girlfriend and I had visited it once when we were younger, but we both wanted to see it again. It's still dope. I had forgotten how many things it indicates - besides accurately displaying the positions of our planets, it also tracks sunrise/set, astrological signs, its x/y axes match the seasons, it has a star map, moon phases and it even shows the moonrise and moonset times. All because a Dutch mathematician in a small, quaint place wanted a dope living room that would prove his point. On Sunday, we drove to another side of the country to visit one of my girlfriend's best friends. She bought a home with her boyfriend in another small, quaint place somewhere south of Rotterdam. And coincidentally they were working on the living room that day. The sight of a poorly lit, chaotic building-site-in-a-room was a familiar one to me - my dad was always working on fixing up our home for as long as I can remember. It dawned on me that my parents were also in their mid/late twenties when they started living together, my dad spending the evenings and weekends improving the home. It also dawned on me that people my age are now buying homes 'n shit. When we entered they were just closing a hole they accidentally made in the wall the day before. The home was known to have been built originally somewhere in the fifteenth century, so the exposed wall was a hotchpotch of brick types and sizes from centuries upon centuries of care and disrepair. I don't know what it was precisely - the centuries old stuff, seeing my parents, the normalcy of my SO's friend buying and fixing a home, but I have rarely felt more old than the past few days. Not old in any absolute sense - I turn 26 in three months, so I can't complain. It's more that I've always thought of myself as a young 19 y/o college student. I've held that identity for long enough that it still lingered on, even though my last lecture was well over two years ago. Clearly I'm in a different phase of my life now, but I don't know yet what that will mean for my future, or what that might mean decades or even centuries down the line.
Had lunch with my colleague slash mentor yesterday. He’s one of the people I talked to while applying for my job, and he was the one who saw a lot of potential in me. After a decade plus of working at our company (which is a lot considering it’s technically only six years old and anyone over three years is effectively a veteran) he announced his resignation last week. It was an interesting conversation - on the one hand, we reflected on his work and time at the company, and on the other hand we discussed my future. His chapter closing, a new chapter for me opening up. We finally found someone to join our team, which means that the extra load I’ve been under since February is finally coming to an end. The perfect moment to re-evaluate priorities. He sees a lot of potential for me to grow into what is effectively a product manager. I didn’t really know what that title meant until yesterday, but it almost perfectly matches what I feel I should be working on. What I think I can become great at if I give it my best shot. Even though I absolutely hate the word manager, I get excited by the skills described here and get excited at the prospect of developing along those axes. In other news, my older sister is not just pregnant, but also getting married and her soon-to-be-husband is gonna take over his father’s farm. All in the next twelve or so months. Times, they are a changin’.
Rearranged my bedroom again. When I left home and lived on my own, I first lived for three years on 150 sqft and then for two and a half years on 180 square foot with two crooked, jagged, slanted walls out of four. So I've gotten into the habit of rearranging and reoptimizing my space every few months or so - as soon as a new arrangement pops into my head, I can't resist spending an evening just to try it out. Even now when I have a perfectly rectangular and spacious 140 sqft for only my bed, cloths and desk. I told my gf I've been dreaming of having a nice, big, preferably wooden bookcase, filled with hardcover books, potted plants and vinyl. She pointed out that I could move the bed over and have 7ft of wall to do just that. So I spent my evening this Monday moving everything around and Marie Kondo'ing some stuff out of the door while I was at it. Anyway, I've ordered a bunch of books that I've loved reading already as audiobook, and I'm looking into good bookcases, which are surprisingly hard to find - there is not a lot that's decent, affordable, and stylish. There's about three styles of bookcases, apparently, and if you don't want any of those, go fuck yourself or go to IKEA. So I will probably do the latter. In other news, it'll probably hit 107F here tomorrow. So much for a temperate sea climate. If I don't respond anymore, I'll probably be dead from a heat stroke or something.
Greetings from Cape Verde! Closest I've ever been to the equator. Good thing I have more than enough sunscreen. Tomorrow's the meeting we're all here for, which is to discuss the (draft) report of the project to advice on the country's path towards electric mobility. It's great to have the last two months of work culminate in this trip. I'm happy with what I managed to pull off in such a short time. Definitely a good notch on my belt, so to speak. But I am also very aware of how serious I'm taking the responsibility for this project. I feel like I care too much, that unless it's perfect and everyone's happy I have failed. Need to give less of a fuck, but I also don't want to be less carerful and responsible. Hm.
Made it to Seattle. Have been awake for 21+ hours, of which ten were in a plane and fifteen were in transit, and I'm now in the birth center I helped locate back in 2014 listening to this album on repeat. It always takes me a while until a holiday really starts to feel real - when I woke up this morning it felt like just another regular day, even though I knew better. When I flew into WA from the north, dipping below the clouds and I started recognizing roads, features and even counties from when I stared at them for half a summer in 2014...it suddenly clicked and made this lil' adventure of mine super real and all the more exciting. Also Isle of Dogs is a really fun movie, I helped this Ukrainian lady order food and I later got the fruitiest pinkest mango dragon thing from Starbucks just 'cuzz.
I stumbled on Giving What We Can a week ago, and since then I've been thinking about giving much more on a regular basis to charity. Looked up a bunch of charities that strive for things I care about a lot, such as global warming and animal welfare. Found out which ones are well regarded and ended up with a few good ones. Last weekend though, the gf and I visited my parents for Easter. It had been a while since I'd last seen them, and while we had a wonderful weekend, it was also pretty clear that they're not in a good place. My dad finally got something of a stable job - something he hadn't had since 2008 - but fell really badly and broke his shoulder in the first week. They got a pretty hefty bill from the energy company, which had promised the bill wouldn't be big. And there's a bunch of other stuff they're dealing with - enough that they're losing sleep over it. So instead of helping charities, I decided to help them out instead. And despite my best efforts, there's this veneer of guilt and empathy and sadness around all of this - I feel bad for not doing more, for not helping more, for choosing what's near over what's far away. For doing more than fine myself. I don't know what's best, don't know if I can know. At least I can try.
Work's dialled up a notch recently; with two of my colleagues on holiday and a bunch of huge new projects, it's been a tight squeeze. Managed to get pretty much everything done that was thrown my way - had to log time to 21 different projects last week. People sometimes wonder why I have a system for pretty much everything work-related. Weeks like this is exactly why - systems help deal with complexity, robust systems help with complexity even under pressure. Anyway, I'm off to Austria tomorrow. Our yearly company skiing trip is finally happening. I'm stoked, the skiing lessons I took have helped a ton in gaining confidence and actually teaching me how to ski properly. Gonna go to Austria by muthafuckin' high speed rail. Looking forward to hubski-ing at 350kph.
Had my Big Presentation the other day. It was for the same client that I bombed my presentation with a month or so ago. I was genuinely worried, since the result would be presented (and had to convince) some twenty-odd wethouders, which are municipal executives. In other words, two dozen cocksure suits who are more than happy to derail your story if it makes them look better. Tough crowd, but it went about as well as it could've. Did my best to make sure that the end result was as good as I could make it which made me much more confident in my presentation. I think it showed. And as icing on the cake I heard that day that my first year contract will become a fixed contract, which is something of a rare good these days. My superior said the decision was 'a no-brainer'. The details will be discussed in a contract renewal meeting, and I've been wondering how to approach it. Negotiations seem more hard when it's already pretty clear I won't leave - feels like it gives me less leverage. On the other hand, I'm thinking about writing a long ass list about the various ways in which I am vital to the company, which should give me the ammunition I need to get the most out of such a conversation. Fundamentally, though, I don't really care about the money; if I did I would be in some boring IT job by now. But I don't want to be undervalued, whatever that means for me...
Last day at my internship today! Man, it was only six months but it doesn't feel like six at all. On the one hand I think I'll miss the nice people, on the other hand I'm a bit glad not to go back to that Office Space again. I'm doing great, but my parents are in a rut. They've been trying to sell their house for the last few months but got hit mercilessly by Murphy's Law. The seller decided to withdraw at the last minute, leaving my parents with a lot of fees to pay and nothing to show for it. Now it's on the market again, back to square one. Not much I can do to help...
I think the first time I was introduced to the "attention economy" was back when I read this phenomenal article: I kind of envy you because you're miles ahead of me in this regard. I catch myself wanting to check Facebook multiple times, every day, even though I don't want to spend time on there. I am now logged out most of the time, which is enough of a barrier that I don't spend time on there anymore, but I do catch myself in moments of boredom mindlessly hitting ctrl-t + f + enter like the trained monkey that I apparently am. One change that did have a lot of impact was to permanently have silent mode enabled. My phone shouldn't be dictating my attention, and while I now miss calls every once in a while I now go hours without looking at my phone instead of minutes and love it. If you want to read two really great books with two different approaches to what attention means in our modern age, I can't recommend Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle and Deep Work by Cal Newport enough.