December Adventure

So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.

I saw this thing called December Adventure though and that fits in nicely with my current push to release a major update for Cuppings. If I’m going to be programming until late this month, then I’d prefer it to be on something that I can release.

I can’t promise that I won’t do any AoC (Factor is looking mighty cool) but I won’t force myself to do anything. With that, let’s get going.

1/12

I started working on the map view which clicking around looked like it could be really annoying. I found some dead ends and was afraid I’d have to hack in Leaflet support myself but I found a dioxus example hidden in the leaflet-rs repository.

Yes, I’m writing this website in Rust/WASM, why do you ask?

That example required a bunch of fiddling with the configuration and a couple of false starts, but now I have a vanilla map view.

I can say that I’m amazed that in this ecosystem 1. an example exists 2. that example works 3. it works in my project with a bit of diffing and 4. it seems to do what I need.

I raised a PR to the project to advertise this example on its README just like it does the others so that others wouldn’t have to search like I did. That PR got merged:

https://github.com/slowtec/leaflet-rs/pull/36

2/12

Today I’ll see if I can tweak the map view to show the location of the cafe we tapped and get things to a point where I can commit the change.

To do this I need to figure out how to pass information along to a router when we tap a venue. That should be easy enough but the Dioxus documentation is between 0.5 and 0.6 now and a lot of it is broken.

A tip from the Discord said I need to put the data into a context from a parent and then get it out again in a child. It’s a bit roundabout and required some refactoring, but it works.

Done on time even for a reasonable bed time.

3/12

Turns out my changes from yesterday did not make it to the staging server. I’ll fix that and manually run the job again.

That’s these annoying wasm-bindgen version errors that keep happening and that require a reinstall of this: cargo install -f wasm-bindgen-cli --version 0.2.97 and the dioxus-cli. Dioxus which by the way is preparing its long awaited 0.6.0 release.

Yes, I build this on the same Hetzner box that hosts it. So here you go: https://staging.cuppin.gs

Other than that not that much will happen today since I spent most of the evening noodling around with Factor (despite my intention not to do any weird programming). It’s a nice language that’s very similar to Uiua which I tried out a while back but not being an array programming language makes it feel somewhat more ergonomic.

4/12

I can’t describe how nice it is to wake up and not have to deal with a mediocre story line involving elves and try to find time to attack a programming problem.

After today, I’m going to need that quiet morning, because I spent until 01:30 debugging an issue: Going to a detail view from the frontpage worked, but loading a detail view directly would throw an error.

There were two issues at play here:

Leaflet maps don’t deal well with being created multiple times so either we have to call `map.remove() or we have to check whether the map has already been created and keep a reference to it somehow.

I solved it by pushing the map into a global variable:

thread_local!(static MAP: RefCell> = RefCell::new(None));

These are Rust constructs I would normally never use so that’s interesting. More interesting is that they work in one go and that they work on the WASM target.

Then the error was gone but the page was blank. Not entirely sure what was happening I poked at the DOM to see all the map elements there but simply not visible. Turns out that because of the different path, the path for the stylesheet was being added to the URL like this: http://127.0.0.1:8080/venue/176/main.css

It just has these two lines:

#map {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100vh;
}

But without a height the map is invisible.

Both issues are solved but not committed. I’ll see tomorrow whether I’m happy with the solution and how to package this up. Also I’m not sure how main.css is being served on production and whether the same fix will work there.

5/12

I couldn’t help but noodle on Advent of Code a bit. Here’s my day 1 part 1 in Factor: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor

I like Factor the programming language. It’s like Lisp or Haskell but without all the annoying bits.

The environment that’s provided with it, I’m not so keen about. It’s annoying to use and has lots of weird conventions that aren’t very ergonomic.

6/12

I’ve been bad and I’ve finished part 2 of day 1 of the Advent of Code: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor#L27

Not so December Adventure after all maybe. I’ll promise I’ll finish the mapping improvements I was working on tomorrow.

7/12

Went on my weekly long bike ride. Then in the evening I didn’t have that much energy for programming other than finishing Advent of Code day 3 part 1: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/commit/0a74c38e7641141e10b4c48203c9e414cc492e1c

(I looked at day 2 part 2 but that just looked very tedious.)

8/12

Got in a ton of commits on Cuppin.gs today. After fixing the map, I wanted to see what would happen if I would add all 2000 markers to the map.

Performance seems to be doable but this is probably not ideal for a webpage. Dynamically rendering the venues is something for later. For now I can probably get away with filtering for the 100-200 nearest locations by distance and dumping those into the map view.

Now I’m back debugging Github Actions. I’m splitting up the build and deploy of the backend and the frontend into separate actions. Compiling dioxus-cli takes forever which is a step I hope I can skip with cargo-binstall.

Iterating on Github Actions takes forever and there really doesn’t seem to be a better way to develop this or a better CI solution that everybody is willing to use.

10/12

Spent some hours massaging the data that goes into the app. I had to add all new venues and after that I wanted to check whether any place in our 2k venue set had closed so we can take them off the display. This is a somewhat tedious multi-step process.

I have an admin binary that calls the Google Maps API for each venue to check the venue data and the business status (CLOSED_TEMPORARILY and such). But to be able to do that you have to feed each place ID into the API. The only issue with place IDs is that they expire from time to time. There’s a free API call that you can use to refresh them.

That expiration does not happen that often. What happens more, I found, is that a place will disappear entirely of Google Maps. For some reason it will be deleted. I don’t handle that case yet so there my updaters break entirely and the quickest fix around it is to delete the venue from the database and restart.

The only data issue that I still have outstanding is when venues move their location to a different address. I have a place around here that I think is still showing on its old spot.

11/12

Tried to run Cuppings in Xcode to be met with some weird compilation errors. Turns out that there’s an Expression type in Foundation that’s overriding my SQLite.swift Expression. It’s a pretty silly reason for code to be broken: Expression – name space conflict with Xcode 16/iOS 18

Also still fighting with the frontend deployments which seem to need a --frozen passed to them to not proactively go update package versions.

14/12

Love to have a crash on startup for the Cuppings TestFlight build and then sit down today to bake a new one and upload that and for that one to work. No clue what the issue was even though I took a look at the crashlog (that I sent in myself).

I’ve also automated building the iOS app to be done by Xcode Cloud which should making new versions (whenever the database is updated) a lot easier.

16/12

Upgraded the frontend to Dioxus 0.6.0 which just came out and has lots of quality of life issues. For my case, I did not need to change a single line of code, just change some version numbers and build a new dioxus-cli.

Nice TUI for serving the frontend

I hope that maybe solves the wasm-bindgen issues on the frontend deploy. The annoying part about the build is that it takes so long that it’s very hard to iterate on.

It’s too late even for me to see what this does. I’m off to bed. You may or may not get a new version of the website by tomorrow morning.

18/12

Spent some iterations running the frontend deploy and rerunning it but now it should be working.

22/12

I spent the evening doing manual data munging and correcting some venue locations that hadn’t been updated correctly through my data life cycle.

That forced me to clarify the two name fields the venues table has.

  • name was the original name field and was pulled from the Foursquare metadata
  • google_name is the name field that’s pulled from Google Maps and was effectively leading but not updated correctly yet when refreshing the data

So to figure that out I did a bunch of auditing in the list to see venues where there was a large discrepancy between the names. Something that happens is that a place will change its name but keep the same location and Google Maps place.

I also added a label to the iOS app to indicate whether this is a DEBUG build but that messed up the layout and I guess I might as well remove it. Sometimes I get confused what I’m running, but since it’s just me running DEBUG builds on their phone, I think I can do without.

I also started a rewrite that I’m not sure I’m going to pull over the line: I wanted to remove the search dependency on Alpine.js and replace it with htmx. For this I asked Cursor to do the translation which it did a stab at but ultimately rather failed to do even the basic steps for it. Then I did it myself and while htmx is super easy to setup, the data juggling I have to do with what I get from Google Maps is very fragile and needs to be cleaned up (which I may or may not do given that things are working right now).

23/12

Working with the backend was very annoying because every time the server restarts, it would log me out. To fix that I changed the persistency of tower-sessions from MemoryStore to FileSessionStorage and that fixed it without issues. There is now a .sessions folder in the backend which needs to be ignored for cargo watch but other than that it’s a drop-in replacement.

That means I will need to write a logout view at some point.

Renaming half a street

An interesting article to read about how the city botched renaming the Manteuffelstraße to Audrey-Lord-Straße. I cycle past this street every day and I don’t think it’s a bad change. Unfortunately, they’ve done it in such a bad way that it’ll poison every person who hears about it against the very concept of government:

  • They failed to notify the people living there until after the change had already passed (incompetent!).
  • They decided to only rename part of the street (insane!).
  • Renaming part of the street forces the street numbers to be re-allocated (insane!).

„Im Nachhinein ist das eine ­gute Frage“, sagt Werner Heck von der ­Bezirksverordnetenversammlung (BVV) Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Werner Heck‘s statements are a good argument here for abolishing the entire concept of the BVV. If they couldn’t even be bothered to check-in on the implementation of one of their more material and prestigious measures, then what are they good for?

Heck sagt, es sei „nicht optimal“ gewesen, dass die involvierten Verwaltungsabteilungen „nicht miteinander gesprochen“ hätten.

This makes it clear that it is not uncommon for the Berlin administration to do things without talking to other departments. This is the way you would work, if you’re mentally entirely dead and checked out.

Das Bezirksamt erklärt, das „komplexe Verfahren“ solle künftig ressortübergreifend organisiert werden.

This sounds ‘good’ to the average German but it will in no way prevent these kind of problems from happening because the issue is not one of process or tactics, but one of culture.

All of these were unforced errors and you can ask yourself maybe they were actually intended to make a mockery of the entire process by a civil service that is politically opposed or too lazy to do any real work.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/wenn-die-umbenennung-von-strassen-in-berlin-schief-geht-ich-kann-mir-nicht-mal-eine-pizza-bestellen-110102184.html

GIFT

Watched “Evil Does Not Exist” as GIFT, the recut and rescored (silent) version performed live by Eiko Ishibashi at HAU1.

This has a shorter runtime than the movie because a lot of fluff is cut out and we are only left with a very summary story. That is a good choice and I can’t say the movie suffers from it very much even though this is version is very much its own thing (i.e. not a narrative movie).

Ishibashi-san is on stage and directs the musical soundtrack while occasionally accompanying the movie on her flute. From the distance it was very hard to tell what she was doing or even what sounds she was producing on top of the soundtrack.

Musically it’s a lot of the soundscapes with the main theme interspersed at various key junctures. We don’t get to learn anything more about the ending.

Review at Letterbox

Love having the kids be off school every 6 weeks or so which means we get a week of everybody adjusting to them being at home and then another week of adjusting them being back at school. All thanks to the trash tier school logistics of Germany.

Reckoning with the Greens

After some occasional brushes with party politics and reading up on the minimal political agency that we foreigners get here, I dove in. The rise of right-wing sentiment seemed to be a good reason to become a member of the Greens just like I imagine it did for a number of people. Much good that did do if you see the continued rise of that sentiment and this Green government all but enabling right-wing parties with their politics of austerity.

I rescinded my Green Party membership a couple of months ago because of irreconcilable disagreements with their politics. Also because I don’t think they’re effective even at the things they want to do. That move put me way ahead of the Green youth wings many of whom recently exited the party for similar reasons and with a lot of fanfare.

Politics

A lot of my beef with the Greens (though by no means all of it) is for their hypocrisy when it comes to the Palestine question.

I don’t really have a stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I know more Israelis than Palestinians and get along with them fine. I’m opposed against theocratic movements and governments of all backgrounds. Still, in this conflict it is obviously apparent what is right and what is wrong and it has been obvious for decades.

This topic is too big to treat in whole and I hope there will be hundreds of reckonings of the past year in German politics at some point. I’ll just post my receipts and explain why they made the Green Party morally repugnant to me.

Cem Özdemir

Özdemir quotes Golda Meir at an Israel Solidarity event

I saw Özdemir in this video with many other high ranking German politicians quote Golda Meir saying: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” This is a vile bit of racism that should be unacceptable but to which nobody batted an eye back then.

Özdemir now is the mostly useless minister for agriculture in this Green government and his political views have not improved.

Baerbock

https://twitter.com/Strack_C/status/1735629355668173297

Baerbock sat here next to the person responsible for spreading IDF propaganda in Germany which you can understand consists mostly of lies and excuses for war crimes. Her fans will make lots of excuses for this but the optics of being this chummy with such a vile human being do not become any less terrible.

Baerbock now is the foreign minister in the current German government where her already questionable and empty platform of “feminist foreign policy” has devolved to the point where she is making passionate pleas in favour of war crimes in German parliament.

https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1846186196419924294

Parliament

https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1771455044098871704

The Green parliamentary fraction invited and posed with Daniel Ryan Spaulding, a comedian who’s made a name for himself now with increasingly racist anti-Palestinian bits.

Habeck

Habeck, the only functional politician in the German government, posted this sermon relatively quickly after the attacks. It has been much praised by mainstream Germany but every Palestinian and Arab listening to it will hear: “You are second class citizens. Your grievances are not real. You do not belong here.”

I didn’t think back then it was smart to put out a message alienating a sizeable minority in your country. I think I’ve been proven right.

Party

What the of the Green Party members themselves?

Inside the party itself on this topic I’ve seen mostly silence and a significant number of statements that would not be out of place in the AfD.

The Green youth wings who left the party did so because of (valid) political disagreements with the party establishment but none of them even once mentioned Palestine in the exit statements.

Party Membership

I don’t think party membership is a thing for most people. There are power dynamics at play which are the same in the Greens as they are everywhere else. In every party there are two classes of members:

  • Career politicians who have decades of experience and relationships in the party. They run everything.
  • Ordinary members who are there to volunteer at the local levels and support the party materially with their time or money.

These two classes have almost no interaction with each other. The mechanisms of inner party democracy (and pretty much any functional organisation) are setup in such a way that ordinary members can’t bother the people doing the “actual work”.

So what is the point of being a member if you don’t have time or money to give?

I would answer that for me there is no point in party membership. I don’t get anything out of it. I may keep voting for the Greens (for lack of better alternatives) and support them in one way or another, but I don’t need to be a member to do either of those things.

Maybe being a party member will be worth it for others who have more to give or who stand to get more out of it. That is a calculation that everybody needs to make for themselves.

Wanted to show the kids some chiaroscuro for their art class about light and dark tomorrow and ran through some of the all time greats from Caravaggio. They were particularly impressed by Holofernes being beheaded.

Always stunning to see how good these paintings are and a bit sad for how long it’s been since I saw one for real. But Sanssouci has the picture of Doubting Thomas so that can be fixed.

https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/caravaggio/589

Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.

There are very few people here who have the desire and skills to be able to look beyond the borders, beyond the Tellerrand, and who feel that what the German state and establishment press and media serve you is simply not good enough. I’d be hard pressed to suggest anything at the same level as what Michael Seemann here and any German interested in the intersection of technology and politics would be well served to read this newsletter.

Waarom ik geen ID-Check kan gebruiken

Met een nieuwe identiteitskaart of paspoort die je in het buitenland krijgt (als je niet meer in Nederland woont), kun je niet meer ID-Check van DigiD gebruiken.

Ik vroeg me af waarom dat was en kreeg dit antwoord:

Identiteitsbewijzen die in het buitenland worden uitgegeven, worden door de Rijksdienst voor Identiteitsgegevens (RvIG – uitgever van de Nederlandse identiteitskaart en paspoort) niet in de Basisregistratie Personen (BRP) geregistreerd. DigiD gebruikt de BRP tijdens de ID-check om te controleren of het identiteitsbewijs (ID) een geldig ID is dat bij die gebruiker hoort. Dat kan dus niet wanneer het ID-bewijs in het buitenland is uitgegeven. Om deze grote groep mensen in het buitenland toch te helpen, controleert de DigiD app tijdens de ID-check het burgerservicenummer (BSN) in de chip van identiteitsbewijzen die in het buitenland zijn uitgegeven. En vergelijkt dan of dat overeenkomt met het BSN dat hoort bij het DigiD-account van de gebruiker.

De RvIG heeft om veiligheidsredenen besloten om per augustus 2021 het BSN uit de chip te verwijderen. Daarom is het niet meer mogelijk voor de DigiD app om het BSN uit te lezen van de chip en kan de gebruiker dit ID-bewijs dus niet meer gebruiken voor de ID-check. Het scannen van de QR-code op het ID-bewijs mag ook niet, want dat kan eenvoudig vervalst worden. De ontwikkelaar van de DigiD app is Logius.

https://www.rvig.nl/wijzigingen-nederlandse-identiteitskaart

https://www.rvig.nl/wijzigingen-model-paspoort-2021

Mijn BSN zit dus niet meer in de chip op het document wegens “veiligheidsredenen”.

Ondertussen heb ik een Europese digitale pas gekregen in Duitsland en kijk of ik die kan gebruiken voor online dienstverlening, maar zoals ze al zeggen: “Inlogmiddelen van andere Europese landen kunnen steeds vaker worden gebruikt om online zaken te regelen met Nederlandse overheidsorganisaties.”

Steeds vaker betekent in dit geval: bijna nooit. We zullen zien.

Always nice to be able to write stuff that the team has been doing and share it with the world.

Kubernetes is a very maligned technology but if properly managed it can be part of an entirely boring infrastructure portfolio. Realistically it’s not doing that much more than running docker on a bunch of machines and pulling images. React has a similarly bad reputation which is not stopping lots of developers from getting tons of work done with it.

https://choco.com/us/stories/life-at-choco/journey-to-kubernetes

I remember when I got banned from the forum of one of Germany’s larger liberal podcasts for saying that Bitcoin is mostly something by and for criminals. I think that statement was pretty much entirely correct.

The story of the Texas Bitcoin mine is sad but we’re living through something similar now where the construction site has installed yet another permanent noise device (a pump) next to our home. The noise level is not too high, but even if it were, it’s not like anything would be done in Berlin about it.

https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

The news that an OSINT researcher spent 30 minutes to find a fugitive that the German police couldn’t find in the past 30 years says a lot about how government works here.

Most likely the police would say that they couldn’t use any modern tools or data sources here because of Datenschutz (data protection) reasons. Datenschutz is 1. a great excuse for people who don’t want to do their jobs and 2. a way to protect every kind of crook and criminal.

Come to Berlin, they said. There’s lots of space here, they said.

In the mean time in Berlin everything is full and anything related to children is wildly under-provisioned (because Germany out of principle does not invest in anything). That creates waiting lists and insane competition for everything.

https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/02/berlin-infrastruktur-kinder-kein-platz-wartelisten-teuer.html

I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.

One of the hosts dropped a casual Hasan Piker reference (in a conversation about pop culture and leftist politics) and… I didn’t even know there were Germans who know who that is.

https://www.instagram.com/hartunfair/

https://twitter.com/ProgrammerDude/status/1758148576134177246

Berlin has a not very well-known facility that allows you to request a Meldebescheinigung online, pay for it online and receive it by mail. I attended Arian to it and it saved his bacon.

Many people here will deny that government digitalisation here is possible or desirable both of which are statements that are untrue and deranged. It is possible to create better services for people. Germans just choose to live in abject squalor for no reason.

SPY x Family – Das Leben der Anderen

I’m enjoying another light season of SPY x FAMILY. It’s a light anime whose premise is that of a spy (Loid) who needs live in deep cover in hostile territory and forms a family of convenience. He finds a woman (Yor) who’s secretly an assassin also in need of cover and an orphan child (Anya) who’s a telepath. It’s great fun.

Season 2 goes on with the story arc and some filler segments thrown in between. Of these, in the third episode (S02E03) they pull off a stunning take on “Das Leben der Anderen”. I was watching it and by the time it was over I couldn’t believe they’d done this.

To connect it to the main plot, the listener who works at the secret police is Yor’s overly jealous brother Yuri, an apt Stasi name if ever there was one. The episode also features some more set pieces which firmly establish Ostania—the city where they live—as Cold War East Berlin.

What adds to the delight is that most people watching the anime will never have an idea about this. It’s like an in-joke for movie people.

Just compare these two stills with each other:

2023 Year in Review

Looking back on 2023 I can say that we made lemonade out of an overall pretty shit year.

But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

CulturaI

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

  • The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
  • Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
  • Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
  • The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
  • Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
  • Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
  • Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.

The thinly veiled racism and colonialism is just the rotten cherry on top.

https://podtail.com/de/podcast/spassbremse/52-whitewashing-and-statebuilding-german-israeli-r/

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Live from Berlin – Lindner

Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’
Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that.
We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

SOMETIME IN THE 2000S, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?”a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.”But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,”Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.

Bad Memory

This is a core fear of migrants in Germany and Europe and it’s not at all unjustified.

In this podcast episode a court case is treated (with the public prosecutor) where during a fluke accident a girl riding along on a bike is killed by a bus in Amsterdam.

The thoroughness and consideration with which that is done contrasted immensely with how things run in Berlin and made it clear to me (again) how unserious this city is.

https://art19.com/shows/napleiten/episodes/88038eb8-3146-499d-983d-ebadce4c3e8f

It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).

What we need with the Bürgeramt though is not 10% more appointments but the automation of at least half of the processes there to no longer need human intervention. We needed that 10 years ago.

Important prototyping work to show how German government forms can be much better and much friendlier than what’s out there right now.

Getting anything like this to production will be very very difficult without a lot of systemic changes and groundwork done first.

Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.

The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.

https://digitalservice.bund.de/blog/mit-kommunikationsdesign-nutzerzentrierte-verwaltungsmodernisierung-unterstuetzen

https://twitter.com/SteveFi04457564/status/1558065690820624387

Something we’re also noticing here is that people with dogs gather in courtyards and on fields in groups and let their dogs roam free, illegally.

They do this in groups together so that if somebody tells them not to, they can use their numbers to intimidate and as described here they use that and many other strategies with officers of the law.

Owning a dog in a dense urban environment is a questionable choice already, but the people around us here take the cake. There are quite a number of socially at-risk individuals who have dogs where both the animal and the human are deeply and certifiably deranged. Both of them accost any human who walks by and it’s often a question of who’s louder the dog’s barking or its owner’s ranting.

I think a forced dog register and quotas/waiting lists for some areas would be a good first step to control the situation here.

Not verified but an interesting data point in how German civil servants don’t have that attractive a position and can get better deals working indirectly for the people ‘at the engines of the global economy’.

That makes you wonder why the engines of the global economy are not here or if they are why it’s not possible to pay civil servants competitive both in compensation and in job satisfaction. To be able to get the best talent and create the kind of state capacity that justifies having a state, the best people working in the civil service should be paid competitively with the top of society.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1487990797517484033

Property dealings in Berlin

Back when I read this exposé in November it struck me as gripping but also as something that could become messy. Turns out that’s true since the piece now has the mark “Censored” and some choice parts of text have been blanked out. I did a quick search but can’t find any updates what might have happened. If I find time later, I’ll look in the Wayback Machine to see what pieces of text disappeared.

The kind of property deals that are described in the article are par for the course in any up and coming city. Recently there was a piece about resistance to the city giving away one of its largest buildings to a private art gallery: https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/portraet-wut-motiviert-mich

The academic backroom dealings should also be considered to be normal especially in small subfields such as Turkey studies. Academics are playing funding games more than they research and the web of foundations that float around are ways to creatively bookkeep and move money around. None of this is really surprising.

Year Note 2021

The days are long but the years are short.

One more year over and these are starting to look like a blur, so here’s what changed.

Work

I gave notice between Christmas and New Year 2020 and spent the first three months of the year in a weird in-between state mostly done with the old job, waiting for the new one to start, in between daycare closures and being sick.

Then the new job started and I fell into a blur of work that has continued for most of the rest of the year. It’s been a nice change but also very intense. Details are on LinkedIn.

Travel

I haven’t been anywhere in 2021 except to an island in Croatia last September with work which definitely was a highlight.

Will I travel again and why? I have no idea.

Learning

I finished Turkish. I now prefer it over German again especially for writing.

I gave up on Chinese and couldn’t motivate myself or figure out how to book the HSK2. I did learn a couple hundred characters which seem to mean the same thing as in Japanese.

I started learning Japanese which is a lot more enjoyable and for basic conversation seems a lot easier. There also has been some strengthening on the claim for a relationship between Turkish and Japanese so let’s see how it goes.

I should have started this way earlier and not listened to anybody who ever said something is difficult. What they mean is that something was difficult for them. Depending on their intelligence, many things may in fact be difficult for them. It shouldn’t matter to me or anybody else.

Kids

The daycare was closed at the start of the year until March or Easter, not sure anymore. Most of the rest of the year things were up and running.

We had a nasty burn wound on one kid that cut the summer break short and gave us several weeks of grief but in the end all turned out well.

Then at the end of the year we gave notice. We are leaving one very esteemed Kindergarten for another which I didn’t think would be possible with two kids in the middle of the year, but it is. We even had several more places willing to take our kids.

The kids are doing really well. After a brief bout of gymnastics which they enjoyed a lot, COVID made us switch to outdoor ice skating for now.

Sports

I finally killed my old fixie or to be more correct it nearly killed me. With it gone, I could finally shop for a real road bike.

Thanks to a ship blocking the Suez Canal and all the other supply chain difficulties in the world, there was a tremendous bike shortage most of the summer (who knows, maybe it’s still going on?) and I got any random bike I could get my hands on in the €1000 price range.

I also got most of the tools and kit that you would need for cycling. It’s the clichéed guy midlife hobby. The local Rapha store is more convenient and also cheaper than many of the cycling apparel you can buy dropshipped over Instagram.

I seem to have ridden 1231km on it and looking forward to doing many times that in the coming year. The details are on Strava.

I picked up bouldering again which when in a rhythm (every 4-5 days) I’m finding pretty enjoyable.

Health

I got boosted randomly on November 17th which was a lot earlier than I expected and before almost everybody I know. I am now AZ/Comirnaty/Comirnaty.

We survived another year. That’s it. That’s the year note.

Update on the construction site

The construction site next to our house is still spewing forth noise and fumes at all hours. The city is unable to do anything here it seems and calling the people at the construction site we are met with nothing but deflection and lies.

They have built a housing around the heater which has maybe reduced the noise by 5dB and we are still left with a value that is far above what is allowed here.

Picture of the housing forthcoming.

Chasing down noise complaints for the construction site next to our house

The construction site that surrounds our house has started a bunch of space heaters this week. The devices had been there for a while but only started being annoying now that they’re turned on. These things run day and night, they make a ridiculous amount of noise (some 60 dB at our window) and because they burns diesel oil they also pollute and stink up the entire courtyard.

One of two running in the courtyard but there are more across the complex of Viktoria Versicherungen

We are used to some noise and annoyance during the day time with this construction site. Some of the noise we went through was truly unbelievable and for some periods we have received a reduction in our rent. We thought that with most external construction being done, we would finally be able to get some peace but now these things are running and will probably run all winter.

The effect they have is to force us to keep our windows closed on one side of the house. You can hear a faint droning even with the windows closed and having the windows open is extremely unpleasant.

The Site

I went to the construction office first. There a man told me he would look into it. After returning from work in the evening of course the heaters were still running and the man had not done anything. When pressed, he said they were allowed to do this (not true) and these would run all winter.

Our Landlord

First point of contact in these is of course our landlord who is our point of contact for the construction site. We’ll see what they will do for us when they take a look at this issue in the coming week. Maybe things will resolve themselves.

The city

Not wanting to leave things to chance, we also wanted to have the city check this out and resolve this issue. We are measuring 60 dB and we have a source that says only 40 dB is allowed at night (which would make sense).

Let’s go over the steps you can take in such a case and whether the local government can do anything for you in such a case.

The first step in such a case would be to call the Ordnungsamt. The Berlin service number can connect you with them but they will tell you that it’s not their deal and refer you to the Umweltamt. This is the first time I heard that this Amt exists.

Finding somebody to talk to at the Umweltamt was a bit of a challenge. Both of the contacts given to me did not pick up their phone (nobody in the city government seems to pick up their phone) but their central desk also told me to get lost and referred me to the Senate for UVK just like the Berlin service number did.

SenUVK has a special entry point for noise from construction sites with a phone number, e-mail address and web form. The webform seems to be broken because after submitting it twice both times it shows an error and does not e-mail me a confirmation of my complaint. The phone number is supposedly open between 9-11 every day to accept complaints but calling that I could reach nobody there. Both of the people given to me as a contact by the Umweltamt were of course not reachable by phone.

This being 9 in the morning as per the phone number opening times, I thought I might as well drop by there to see what’s going on. I only live a ten minute bike ride away.

I knew the SenUVK office at Am Köllnischen Park but I was told to go to Brückenstraße 6 around the corner. There I went into one building and could not find anything other than generic offices. I was going to give up but I walked up the street towards Jannowitzbrück and found another number 6 entrance to what seems to be known as the Jannowitz Center.

The ground floor of that building was a construction site. Next to the elevator it did find a plan of the SenUVK offices that listed Baulärm on the fifth floor. I took the elevator to the fifth floor only to find another construction site. Then I went down and asked the construction workers whether the entire building was a construction site. They said, nah, floors 7 and so and so are not. So I went up to the 7th floor and found the Pförtner there who referred me to room 191 on the 2nd floor1.

The person with the keys

On the second floor I found a very long office corridor where everything seemed to be more or less operational. I walked all the way to the end and after some turns found the office numbered 191 which of course was closed. Not to be dissuaded that easily, I started knocking and opening the doors in that corridor which were labelled Immissionsschutz.

Then some schmuck came to me and asked me what I was doing. I told him the reason and he said he couldn’t help me and that he found it unangenehm that I just walked in like that. I told him that I found it unangenehm that the web form was broken and nobody here was picking up the telephone. The guy clearly didn’t bargain for any of this and made away quickly before I could show him the true meaning of the word unangenehm.

Then a man arrived to work at the 191 office who was actually helpful and filed my complaint. It turns out that space heaters for construction sites only get a permit when there is a pressing technical need for them which is extremely rare. This construction has already taken very long and we would really want to finish it, is not enough reason it seems. The waterpump that we could hear pumping and hissing at regular intervals at night we could probably also complain against. We’ll see next week what comes from this complaint.

He confirmed also that they were having issues with the phone line and that they are not the people maintaining the web form.

If this person is to be believed, this construction site is doing whatever it wants because the act of following up on these breaches is so incredibly difficult and time consuming. He said they can press on this complaint and check the permits but in the end there’s only so much they can do as well.

Local Government IT

After the broken web form I also was kinda intrigued what kind of systems they would have there at the Senate’s offices. The guy filled in the complaint details into the editable fields of a MS Word template. That’s it. That’s about the level of where we are at when it comes to local government automation.

I know these problems up close and they are difficult to solve even if you have access to best in class tools. But with those kind of tools at least you have a fighting chance. If you work in government without in-house IT, where you can’t procure anything useful, you don’t have credit cards and even if you found something useful you couldn’t use it because of fears around Datenschutz, there is no way you are going to get anything done.

Most of these problems could be solved by deploying Airtable and Zendesk, but they of course won’t be allowed to do that. I don’t have to mention that local government being ineffective benefits companies doing construction without following any of the rules.

  1. This room numbering scheme is insane. []

“dass deutsche Behörden und bürokratische Prozesse mitverantwortlich sind am Scheitern des Start-ups.”

A kind of magical thinking that would rely on collaborating with German government institutions for your startup. The only way that is going to work is if you have a very special (paid for) in into the CDU. Also otherwise a hilarious story about the weird world of cyber.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/cyberwaffen-made-in-berlin,Sbzq3WP

My easily incensed people

A Turkish guy in a van turns the corner tight enough to almost run us over. He then stops and pulls down the window: “Möchtest du mir etwas sagen?”

To which I better don’t reply: “Ja, ‘senin ananı babanı sikeyim.'”

These guys are so easily triggered. Once I did say this and the dude followed me through half of Schöneberg in his car.

Wir üben keinen Druck auf unsere Mieter aus. Kein Mieter wird bei uns verdrängt. Das würde gegen unsere Werte verstoßen.

A quote by Ralf Spann the boss of Akelius, a private housing corporation in Berlin, who are known to intentionally shut down hot water and other amenities to get people to vacate their apartments.

Akelius is one of the corporations that is on the chopping block to be expropriated.

https://taz.de/Mietendeckel-in-Berlin/!5628554/

Answer GKV Spitzenverband

Dear Mr. Alper Cugun,

Thank you for your request.

A good coverage with medical services and an adequate access for all population groups belong to the central intentions of Health Policy. The question how many doctors will be needed for a suitable supply of the people and how an adequate distribution of doctors can be reached is as nearly as old as the statutory health insurance itself. The GKV-Spitzenverband is a member of the “Gemeinsamer Bundesausschuss (G-BA)”, a committee that decides on legal norms on a federal level, including the “Bedarfsplanungs-Richtlinie”. That is the fundamental basis of the planning policy for outpatient doctors in the regions. Actually, the G-BA decided to change some of the norms and to increase the number of paediatricians by approximately 400.

Berlin as a metropole has altogether a very high level of doctors in the outpatient care. That includes also the number of paediatricians. In this respect, we have no shortage of paediatricians in general. Nevertheless, as in many other regions we have partially problems with a good distribution of these doctors.

For Information about concrete measures to improve the supply situation, please contact the KV Berlin. If you have problems to find a paediatrician, you can try the online search engine of the KV Berlin. There you will find nearly 400 paediatricians in Berlin (https://www.kvberlin.de/61arztsuche_en/index.html). You also can call or contact the “Terminservicestelle” of the KV Berlin. That is a special service center of the KV, that arranges appointments with doctors for you, if you can´t find a doctor on your own.

I hope this information will be helpful for you.

Kind Regards

Kathleen Lehmann
Referat 2140 — Bedarfsplanung, Psychotherapie, neue Versorgungsformen

I think they told me to go fuck myself. But in any case our problem finding a pediatrician has been solved through other means.

Figuring out why there is a shortage of pediatricians

Just like almost every public service in Berlin the pediatrician situation is absolute squalor. It’s impossible to find one who picks up the phone or takes on new patients1.

We’ve had some bad incidents in the past with sketchy doctors because of this and now I’m trying to figure out why this is the way it is.

  1. Call my lead for a pediatrician
    “We’re very sorry but we can’t take any new patients.”
  2. Call the Kassenärztliche Verein
    “It’s not us who do this.”
    I am told to call the Dachverband der Krankenkassen
  3. Call the Spitzenverband
    “We do not determine how many pediatricians can settle in a given area.”
    The telephone person says they are a temp and do not have any channel up to their leadership. I’m told to call my own Krankenkasse.
  4. Call Techniker Kankenkasse
    ‘Wir sind nicht dafür zuständig.’
    The person says they have the same problem on a personal level in Hamburg but can’t really do anything for me professionally. I am told to call the Kassenärztliche Verein
  5. Call KV (again)
    Reception says that I can get a peds appointment sometime in the future from a different number of theirs (not what I want). I called this number before and they will not give me a pediatrician and that is if they bother to pick up the telephone.

Every instance says “Dafür sind wir nicht zuständig.”and sends me on until I’ve closed the loop.

It’s not the first time that this happens. I’ve previously spent half an hour being sent in a loop between Polizei and Ordnungsamt. This is the way that Germany functions: nobody is responsible for anything and everybody in between can get fucked.

Corollary: if it is impossible to figure out why something is the way it is, it is also impossible to fix it.

  1. Don’t bother tipping me a pediatrician unless you’re sure they take new patients. []

Living without a car in Berlin

From a thread about whether it is possible or not to live in Berlin without a car (gasp!). This is what a normal odd day of mine looks like.

The car isn’t the problem or more like: having a car would be a problem. During those rush hours, doing the same journeys by car would take at least twice as long.

  1. 07:00 aufstehen, Kinder anziehen, KiTa brot machen
  2. 07:45 Lastenrad holen, noch was anziehen usw., Kinder überzeugen einzusteigen
  3. 08:10 Abfahrt zum Kita (andere Seite von Kreuzberg, 2.8km)
  4. 08:25 Kita Ankunft
  5. 08:40 Idealfall Abfahrt Kita zur Arbeit (Schöneberg, 7.7km)
  6. 09:10 Sitze auf dem Arbeitsplatz
  7. 16:30 Abfahrt Arbeit (weil ich sie gebracht habe muss ich sie jetzt nicht abholen, kann auch 16:00 sein oder 17:00)
  8. 16:45 Biomarkt wenn wir noch einkaufen brauchen
  9. 17:10 Abfahrt Biomarkt
  10. 17:25 spätestens wieder zu Hause

Den nächsten Tag tue ich das gleiche andersrum mit dem Zwilingsrad und hole die um 15:30 ab beim Kita. Ich fahre ungefähr 15km Rad pro Tag.

Ich arbeite 30 Stunden aber das ist nicht wegen des Autos oder so sondern weil ich meine Kinder auch ab und zu noch sehen möchte.

Mit Auto wären wir nicht schneller (eher viel langsamer weil Stau + Parkplatzsuche usw.) also das macht für unsere Stunden gar keinen Unterschied.

I’ll be proud to live in Berlin when the home owner expropriations are passed and the real estate madness is curtailed.

Article 15 of the Country’s Basic Law states that “land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalization, be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/berlin-housing-gentrification-referendum/

Late arrival to Verrücktes Blut

I was supposed to see this play six years ago. Let’s say better late than never. Seen Wednesday, March 20th at the Maxim Gorki Theater.

It starts off very chaotically with everybody shouting. It is very hard to understand what anybody says. This gets better later on but I still had to peek at the surtitles regularly. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Dutch theaters where they strap microphones to their actors.

The premise is clever and the scene surprisingly light-weight. What follows is a bit too drawn out. The physical acting does not impress and you can only threaten to shoot somebody so many times before you actually have to shoot them. If you don’t, things get a bit dull.

The play itself is badly dated and the various debates have far moved on mostly to become irrelevant. The bits of Schiller that they play have held up much better over the past two centuries than Verrücktes Blut has over the past decade. Schiller also lets the actors in this play show their skills.

There is some Islam-criticism that is supposed to be edgy but misses the point. Additionally, we hit the obligatory ethno-clichés, many of which made me laugh during the wrong moments. Neither manages to be actually cutting. The social engagement on display is there for entertainment only.

The troubles with the kids in the play have only worsened and a new generation is now forced to make their rounds through Germany’s broken school system. Nothing about the systemic reasons behind the problems the kids are facing is even mentioned in the play. The situation is unfixable and there is nothing to be done other than ‘acting dumb’.

The actors can’t help the fact that this theater will have to play their break-out hit until the end of days. Especially if it keeps on filling the house. But at some point, it might be good to call the curtains.

Scooters in Berlin

Scooters are not legal in Germany yet but in select locations like here in Berlin you can try them out on private land.

This was my first ride and they are an immense pleasure to use once you get your feet positioned properly. I’m not sure yet what happens if you fall off one but I’m pretty sure it will be bad.

The law allowing these on the road has supposedly been signed but still has to work its way through some German institutions. What will happen when these are legal is obvious:

  • People will adopt them en masse because scooters are amazing.
  • Chaos will ensue everywhere because cities like Berlin have near zero infrastructure to facilitate these vehicles and are unable to adapt at the speed required.
  • There will be some accidents which will be blown up by the media.
  • A huge backlash will ensue as has already happened in many other places.
  • The German attitude towards risk and the ever-present machinations of the car lobby will get scooters banned.

I hope I’m proven wrong but it’s hard to see how it would go any other way.

Parklets Bergmannstraße

I got around to visiting the Parklets in the Bergmannstraße. That is a plural because there are two of them during this pilot and that’s it.

Parklet Bergmannstrasse

As far as quality and usage goes I don’t think there is anything to complain about. The benches look and feel nice and they are being used by the tons of people passing through this street. It is nice to have some extra seating here that is non-commercial.

Parklet Bergmannstrasse

The only issue is that the rest of the street (especially the traffic situation on the thoroughfare) is still terrible. After having seen the botched project in the Maaßenstraße1 local government is afraid to do much of anything, let alone give this street and neighborhood the overhaul they so desperately need.

Maybe they are right to not do anything. Public works in Berlin have the tendency to not work out. If you already know that you are going to screw it up, you might as well keep your hands off it. But there are lots of new people in Berlin who demand better and in many cases are also willing and able to do it themselves. Let’s see how long the government can resist that pressure.

Begegnungszone Nein Danke

  1. That Begegnungszone is not an utter failure. It has reduced the average speed of cars driving through the street mostly by preventing them from holding drag races at night. Still it is ugly enough to be scary. []

UIKonf Unconference: Gradual Coordinators

I dropped by the UIKonf unconference yesterday and gave a quick code/architecture talk. Normally I do mostly design/strategy type talks which are a lot more handwavy, so this felt a bit out of my water.

Besides actual code I threw in some talk about impostor syndrome, the value of cleaning and maintenance, gradualism as defined by parkour and Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”.

I think there is a lot of value in getting more different perspectives into the standard programming talk. I have seen enough engineering talks by now and many of them suffer from a lack of diversity.

A possible agenda for a tech workers solidarity movement

The USA example of resistance against Trump in the form of Tech Solidarity quickly gained a following in the Netherlands with TechSolidarity.nl and here in Berlin with some Tech-Solidarity-Berlin. I’ve had a small role in both of those groups’ creation but I’m currently not an active participant.

Tech Solidarity’s success is of course unique to the local environment and Pinboard’s prior activism in tech. That said there are a lot of similarities that make similar movements over here possible and necessary. The Netherlands and Germany have elections this year and are faced with similar populist disruptions. The technology industries here are also very heavily dependent on expat workers who have specific issues and interests. The time seems ripe for people in technology to organize themselves.

The idea of the Berlin organization is not to duplicate efforts. There are already lots of initiatives in Berlin that address most parts of this agenda. What tech solidarity should do here is 1. posit an encompassing vision of what we want to achieve and that it is possible to achieve that together 2. function as a switching board to match people who want to do things with things that need people.

I’m associated with the Berlin meetup but I haven’t attended any of the American events so we had to piece together what we thought would be an agenda for our local context. I suggested these five points that I personally think are relevant and critical right now.

  1. Maintain the freedom of movement and other liberal values that make Berlin and Europe an amazing place to live and work.
    Europe is an unique place in the world—increasingly so, though not as unique as we might like to think. The high standard of living and freedom enjoyed here attract people from all over the world.
    Those positive qualities and the new people they attract are not seen as positive by all Europeans alike. Populist movements want to close borders, go back in time and tear down the institutions of our liberal open societies. These measures will affect foreign workers and immigrants much more than they will local residents.
    What can we do to maintain and strengthen our local social democracies, the institutions that make up Europe and how can we scale out these values?
  2. Make it so that foreigners in Berlin can and do participate in local civil society.
    This is not just a problem for foreigners but they suffer from much higher hurdles when it comes to this. Foreigners are often here temporarily, usually do not speak German and do not get to vote. It is harmful to both residents and to society as a whole for people to be disenfranchised.
    What can be done right now to circumvent those limitations and what needs to be done in the future to create a more vibrant and inclusive civil society?
  3. Support diversity initiatives of all kinds in the workplace.
    In most tech companies in Berlin diversity is neither valued or practiced. Diversity has proven benefits to everybody involved. Also by not starting to practice this now the industry is putting themselves on the back foot when it comes to the future.
    What can we do to increase the awareness and practice of diversity?
  4. Use our skills and resources to help local immigrants and refugees.
    People working in technology have access to an immense amount of economic and social opportunities. People who are new to Berlin or who have already lived here for a while should have access to the same opportunities and be able to contribute their efforts and perspectives.
    How can we educate and include people without traditional paths into technology and make the sector as a whole more open and inclusive?
  5. Formulate actionable positions on professional ethics (data retention, car exhausts etc.).
    We need to formulate ethical standards for people working in technology and back them up when they need to abide by them. The potential to do things that are unethical and harmful is increasing just as quickly as technology’s influence but not everything that is possible should be economically determined. Laws are not a sufficient protection since they can be weakened or removed due to changing political circumstances.
    What are ethical red lines that we can agree upon and what is practical support we can offer people?

Welt am Draht

I strolled through the massive exhibition ‘Welt am Draht’ at Leipziger Strasse this weekend. This is a selection of video art from the massive Julia Stoschek Collection exhibited in the former Czech Cultural center.

Like everybody says the quality of video art in general is extremely inconsistent. That is true in this exhibit as well. There are a bunch of works where it is not at all obvious why somebody finished it, somebody approved it and somebody paid money for it.

The works that were most interesting in this exhibition consistently were not the video ones but those created with a game engine. That may be my own novelty bias at work, but a fully digital workflow like that allows: 1. more and faster iteration 2. fully dynamic products, the combination of which leads to totally new kinds of things that can be produced.

Some examples:

I forget what this was, but despite the concept being more or less ridiculous it has a compelling internal consistency.

RMB City by Cao Fei is a rich and spectacular playground of randomness.

I can’t really argue with any of Ed Atkins’s work which stands out for the pure skill of the renderings combined with spoken word that is not trite (so rare).

Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection is an ongoing collage of elements in a dynamic simulation that looks like an edgy version of the large scale installations Theo Watson makes.

Why Käthe Kollwitz is one of Germany’s most important figurative artists

Today I got a tour of the Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin. I had wanted to visit this museum for a while but this proved the concrete reason to finally go (though the café next door makes some mean pancakes if you find yourself in the area).

I was recently attended to her existence by MacGregor’s series on German history (episode). I now believe that she is one of the most important German artists of the past couple of centuries. If there are any other significant candidates, I would like to hear about them1.

What makes her stand out as an artist are:

  • Her mastery of both drawing and sculpture.
  • That she depicts ‘common’ people and social themes prominently. She thought these people were beautiful in their own way and that their plight was one that merited attention. For me this is a stark contrast with how current (artistic) elites try to ignore the ‘common and stupid’ people (like Trump voters).
  • The loss of her son and how that permeates her later work.

Our tour guide didn’t make the connection but I find it more than fitting that on May 1st we would be looking at for instance the Weavers cycle (one of which I have pasted below).

Kollwitz_Riot_Best

  1. I discount Caspar David Friedrich because he was a painter of landscapes. []

Sleep by Max Richter

Kevin posted yesterday that he had an extra ticket for Max Richter’s Sleep at Kraftwerk Berlin yesterday. Without a moment’s hesitation I packed my sleeping bag and cycled there with him.

Kraftwerk Mitte is a disused power plant in the middle (Mitte) of the city that is now a club venue and host to a variety of events. The most striking features of it are large open spaces and lots of exposed concrete everywhere.

Max Richter I didn’t know before but I quickly confirmed that I would agree with his music. It had been one of my desires to attend a classical music concert while lying down being able to doze in and out of sleep as your mind and body dictate. Classical concerts tend to be long and uncomfortable affairs.

I hadn’t imagined I would get the chance to do this during an 8 hour overnight concert.

Preparing to spend the night here listening to music by Max Richter

The music is very smooth to listen to and it is a kind of music that Richter is known for (read this interview). I’m listening to From Sleep now as I write this. I listened to the first couple of hours and then fell into a fitful sleep until I woke up again at 07:30 to catch the end.

Sleeping on stretcher beds at a power station 15 minutes cycling away from home with a couple of hundred other people was a strange experience. It was for one one of the lowest key camping trips I have ever undertaken. Though I’m used to the occasional communal sleeping arrangement, those are totally different situations. Berlin’s club spaces facilitate experiences in between the intimate and transgressive but even then this is an odd one out.

I probably also wasn’t the only person in the room who considered it wry that we would pay €48 to sleep in circumstances similar to thousands of others in Germany right now.

I’m still not sure what to make of the event but it is a memorable experience that will stay with me for a while like a dream but more powerful.

New beginnings

At the end of 2015 personal and professional changes made it clear to us that we would not continue Hubbub in its current form. That realization made me reorient myself in Berlin and refocus on my core skills as an engineer.

I set myself the goal to work on a significant product as part of a larger team. I thought it would be useful to change up my professional life which thusfar had consisted only of freelance and client work. A long story short, as of this week I’m employed as a software engineer at ResearchGate.

Mann/Frau

The idea that German television is necessarily terrible has to be reconsidered. I’ve recently started watching Deutschland ’83 which is amazing (more on that later) and yesterday I finished season two of the web series Mann/Frau by BR PULS.

Mann/Frau is a mirror format byte-sized episodic where each installment details the interactions of a man and a woman their relations and lives. It treats most of the themes occupying people around my age living in Berlin but manages to do so drawing more from slapstick than from cliché.

The series is helped enormously by the fact that each episode concludes somewhere under five minutes. Brevity unfortunately is a rare commodity in Germany. The benefits of it here are that it forces them to get to the point quickly, cut rapidly and finish. Episodes of this length also greatly facilitate binge watching1. I had never considered you could make a traditional format series with episodes this short, but it works fine.

Halfway through I did develop an intense distaste for the man (Mirko Lang2) and the man episodes. This isn’t just because the man character is a huge doofus, but also because it turns out that the man and woman episodes are written and directed by a brother and sister respectively. The woman episodes are more punchy, contain less whining and more action.

In this interview with the brother and sister directors the problem becomes painfully obvious. During the entire interview the brother does most of the talking but doesn’t say anything of substance.

I will keep watching when the next season comes out but I might just fast forward through most of the man’s episodes.

These series may have a catalytic effect on the German television landscape. By their very existence they educate the tastes of an audience that might not have known or expected something like this to be possible. And actually creating something good in turn makes it so that other tv makers can’t hide behind the excuse that the whole landscape is mediocre. Who knows what more may be possible.

  1. They released all 20 season two episodes on YouTube at once. []
  2. Funnily enough this series isn’t listed in his filmography anywhere because I guess it is a web series. []

Les Contes d’Hoffmann

I went to “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” yesterday in one of Berlin’s three operas thanks to this piece in the Guardian. Yes, I have to rely on a British paper for reliable cultural advice about Berlin.

The Komische Oper is a ten minute bike ride from my house and you can get a discounted ticket with some mild visual obstruction for €18. This makes it a fairly ideal way to spend a Sunday in Berlin which otherwise can be fairly quiet (stores aren’t open, most places close at five or six).

I’m not an expert on opera but I enjoyed the staging and the performances a lot. The Komische Oper’s productions can look a bit kitschy but this was all fairly in line. I can’t share anything from the play thanks to an extremely stringent copyright policy, so below is a recording of one of the major songs by the Met.

After having severed my relation with theater, opera is something that is still fun and interesting to me. What is especially interesting about opera is that despite it fielding some of the biggest budget stage productions we have, it allows a lot of space for weird things. That is not just the case for this opéra fantastique but reading the plot of any opera will leave you amazed at how cheesy it is.

The fact that opera is so open to even the dumbest of stories and at the same times is a spectacular confluence of the multimedia arts would indicate that it has a grand future. Unfortunately the average age of the attendees indicates that that is not the case yet.

The redesign of Moritzplatz roundabout

This is turning into a traffic blog more than anything else. After taking stock of the plans for the new Maaßenstraße which is very slowly nearing completion, now let’s take a look at another place close to my heart: Moritzplatz. The square is right underneath my office and as such I cross it several times daily both on foot and by bike.

Cyclist get hits on MoritzplatzA couple of weeks ago week an accident took place there where a cyclist was touched by a car. No big deal in his case, but it could have been worse considering the way motorists behave here. I have to pay close attention every time I cross this roundabout otherwise this could happen to me as well.

Redesign

Two weeks ago they started marking what is to be the revamped Moritzplatz. I had my hopes up that it would be a serious improvement but judging from the plans it is mostly going to be a new paint job.

New lines on MoritzplatzThe paint job will separate the bicycle lane with stripes from the car lane narrowing the space the cars get and widening the space the bicycles get. The cycle lane itself will be painted bright red. New lines on Moritzplatz

Cycling on the new markings and adhering to the new situation is a bit weird but it does feel like it’s going to be an improvement. It is however not going to fix the most important problem with the square1.

Redesign Moritzplatz

The new situation for cyclists

Cyclists get their lane doubled in width and protected by markings. Whether that protection will mean anything in reality remains to be seen. Cars in Berlin will drive anywhere they please. What is a bigger problem on this roundabout and what will remain so in the new situation is that it is unclear who has precedence on the points where cyclists and cars have to cross each other. The angle with which the two cross has also remained the same so you really have to pay attention not to hit a cyclist and not to get hit by a car. A real solution would have been to mark the roundabout with Sharks’ teeth and maybe even to elevate the cycle path. That way cars entering and leaving the roundabout notice that they do so physically. Physical separations on the road make the power dynamic a little less unbalanced like you can see in this example from California. They are of course also expensive. There are roundabouts in the Netherlands that are laid out this defensively even though that usually is not necessary. Schermafbeelding-2012-07-03-om-13.52.56-480x309

The new situation for pedestrians

Pedestrians around Moritzplatz have really been shafted and they are getting a tiny improvement in the new situation. For a pedestrian there is no safe way to cross the square. The underground crossing through the U-Bahn station does not count. Going down and up stairs2 isn’t an option for disabled people and it’s too much effort for most people in general. Traffic should be safe for its weakest participants so that it benefits everybody. Let’s take a look at the various options to cross Moritzplatz. Keep in mind that you will often have to cross at least one arm of the roundabout to get anywhere. West – There is no way to cross the road here except for the traffic light at Stallschreiberstraße. This traffic light feels broken for pedestrians because during rush hour it gives you about 12 seconds to make the crossing. Almost nobody makes it across during the green phase and everybody knows that the red phase takes forever so people also cross when it’s already red3. The traffic light is not an option for crossing Moritzplatz since it is 50m away. That is too far. North – On this side there is an island in the road where pedestrians are relatively safe so at least they don’t have to make the entire crossing in one go. It is still unsafe because there isn’t a zebra crossing but it’s better than nothing. East – There is no way to cross here except for the pedestrian crossing 50m down Oranienstraße. South – A new pedestrian island is planned here. Unfortunately it is 15m off the main arm but that is better than 50m. Just like at the other islands, there won’t be a zebra crossing there which makes any pedestrian trying to cross still a potential victim. Redesign Moritzplatz

It doesn’t matter if there is no way to cross the road, people still do of course. Even if you pay attention and cross the road when there is no traffic, incoming cars expect to be able to push you off the road4. At which point you are forced to run across or be killed.

The main flaw here is that people shouldn’t be forced to walk ten or fifty meters more to make things more convenient for motorized traffic. People are more important than cars.

Update: The work is nearing completion and actually the new markings do not seem to make that much of a difference except to cause everybody on the square to be fairly stressed out.

I guess this adequately describes all of us.

  1. Thankfully it’s not going to be botched as badly as the redesigned Kottbusser Tor roundabout. []
  2. Moritzplatz does not have an elevator for some strange reason. []
  3. German pedestrian lights don’t have a blinking green phase in between green and red. []
  4. I actually cannot comprehend how this is acceptable behaviour and why these people are allowed on the road at all. []

Encounter Zone Maaßenstraße

Berlin is rebuilding the Maaßenstraße into the first Begegnungszone (‘Encounter Zone’) of its kind in the city. Works are underway now after a public consultation was finished last year or the year before. I looked around a bit but I couldn’t find the plans for what they are actually building there. A quick e-mail to the senate solved that problem and I got a PDF of the plan.

Redesigning Maaßenstraße

The most important bit of that plan is the layout of the new street which is dramatically different from what we have right now. Maaßenstraße is a street in Berlin saturated with cafes and restaurants where people from far West Berlin will go to go out on weekend nights. It also touches on Motzstraße which is a popular gay going out area and there are tons more bars and restaurants littered about. On Saturdays the market on Winterfeldtplatz is brimful of people and blocks most of the traffic on the South side.

The quantity of establishment is deceiving since the gastronomy on Maaßenstraße is of such a low quality that I wouldn’t regularly visit any of the places there except the two Turkish kebab places Hasir and the Keb’up House (for the late night döner box).

Traffic wise there used to be bike paths on the pavement but because of the heavy use by pedestrians and the fact that the bike path was level with the walking area, these caused dangerous situations. The road itself wasn’t a great alternative as it was used mostly for parking, double parking and the ostentatious display of muscle cars at night. All in all the usage of the street was thoroughly out of whack with how space was distributed between the various groups.

The new plan removes parking altogether which may or may not work depending on the enforcement level. Cars can park anywhere they want in Berlin and receive a fine that is so low nobody really cares about it. Cycling and driving are integrated on the remaining piece of road that is a lot more narrow than it was and lots of space is allotted to pedestrians walking and hanging out on the street. I have no idea what that is going to do to the noise levels in the street but I don’t live on a popular party street for a reason.

I’ve annotated what I think is noteworthy about the plan below (in a 13MB image file, click for big). All in all the plan looks solid and is bolder than I could have hoped for. It remains to be seen how it will be received by drivers and whether the police enforces the zones that are on there with vigour.

06-Flyer_Begegnungszone_maassenstr

DOTA night at Meltdown Esports Bar

Dota night at Meltdown

Yesterday I attended the weekly Dota2 night at Meltdown esports bar for the first time. I’m looking for people who I can play with regularly because going out into solo queue is becoming a bit tedious and unpredictable. There is a small crowd of people there who play 5v5’s in a private lobby against the Meltdown London cafe. It’s a lot of shouting and mostly fun.

What strikes me when I go to these get togethers is that however different the people are, there is a shared culture because everybody reads /r/dota2 and watches the same streams and tournaments. It is fairly homogenized everywhere with the exception of China which is insular with its own client, servers and a slew of native language media.

I was also happy to see that the gender balance wasn’t as one-sided as I had feared. There’s still a long way to go but what I saw at the bar makes me optimistic.

The second victorious team

Session of the traffic commission of the Berlin borough of Neukölln

Neukölln committee for traffic meeting

I heard about the session of the traffic commission of Berlin-Neukölln through the great Urbanist Magazine who wrote that cities get the bike paths they deserve and that being present at political sessions is a prerequisite to change things.

So I made my way over to Rathaus Neukölln during rush hour yesterday to listen in on the session. Even though these things are deadly boring, they are at the same time extremely revealing of the workings and attitudes of our governments and just for that fact worthwhile to occasionally visit. At the same time I think it is a civic duty to attend these sessions for the things that you are interested in. If you don’t, others will.

Berlin.de on an iPhone

The website Berlin.de lists the proceedings of the session but it is unfortunately totally unusable on a mobile device (see the screenshot above) so I went by ear and noted what I could understand of the proceedings. The meeting protocol was I may add a bit chaotic and unclear. Part of it may be because I was ten minutes late (thank BVG) but I would expect local political sessions to at least have signs to show who’s who (like they do in Amsterdam).

Points two to five of the agenda were about improvements for cycling in Neukölln and after some debate all of these points were summarily rejected by the SPD/CDU who have a majority in this part of the city and I gather also chair the commission. For some proposals the chairs took offence and for the others they declared that what was proposed would be of no use. During the vote for each of these points they were rejected.

The debate about point 3 was especially illuminating.

Point 3 was a proposal to research how to keep the bike path on Karl-Marx-Straße free of parked cars. The chair of the committee said that this problem simply cannot be solved. The representative of the police said that they don’t have the capacity to enforce the law when it comes to this matter and that doing so would jeopardize their ability to stop violent crime1. Somebody present requested that these people be fined to which the chair replied that that wouldn’t help either because people don’t care about the fines.

The chair cited examples to the contrary from around Schloßstraße and Savignyplatz. These don’t really seem relevant to me. Fines for parking on a bike lane are nearly trivial2 but not so trivial that they wouldn’t be felt in Neukölln at all.

A couple of people attending protested3 and said that this was a selective application of the law meant to fuck cyclists. These people were not taken seriously at all by the committee.

It seems that the governing parties in Berlin reject any proposal submitted by the opposition. An opposition who I may add do not seem to be the sharpest knives. Some of the proposed solutions were not realistic in the slightest. One example: replacing the DHL trucks with cargo bikes is batshit crazy. To add to that: DHL trucks parking on the bike lanes are not the biggest problem at all and something that can be solved fairly easily.

I went to this meeting to see why cycling in Berlin is so bad as it is and most of what I thought was confirmed. Berlin does not take cyclists seriously and the governing bodies are populated by people who say they care but who really don’t give a shit.

  1. They were checking cyclists for lights at the very same moment on Kottbusser Damm. []
  2. They are a couple of dozen euros where of course they should be closer to €100. []
  3. I got in late and I wasn’t clear whether spectators were allowed to say anything at all during these kind of meetings. []

Berlin real estate development Victoriapark edition

Last Sunday the Senate’s plan to build on Tempelhof was voted off thankfully. Not just to preserve the field which is a one-of-a-kind but to signal to the city that their way of managing construction and housing is not the right way (a full treatment in German).

Then yesterday I went for a run in the nearby Viktoriapark. Out of necessity because I was trying out a running track which turned out to be closed to the public.

Another closed track

So instead of that I ran my laps through the park up and down the hill of the Kreuzberg and was treated with some spectacular views.

Sunset

Doubling back through the South side of the park I came upon this very odd housing development built around a former brewery.

Flaschenkeller

The entire thing was built from scratch and looked super eery and artificial.

Housing development

And worst of all it is hard to access and hermetically closed off from the park. The entire area is fenced off and unaccessible from the park (and vice versa). When you try to pass through you end up on this dead end square. It is a gated community in the center of Berlin and probably exemplary of the type of developments the city government likes to see.

Dead end square

And from there on you can only get out the same way you got in. I can’t really imagine what it must be like to live there without any city activity or people passing through. The only people there are your neighbours on their balconies and their watchful eyes. These people have been sold the fact that they live in Kreuzberg and they probably pay a premium for it but this is as far from that city experience as you can get.

And finally on the other side of the track I found this local sporting club having their BBQ.

Sport club BBQ

Tempelhofer Park and the union between local government and property developers

There is a shack on Tempelhofer Feld that explains the senate’s plans with the park and the construction they plan to do there:

One sided citizen participation because that is how this city rolls

The people of 100% Tempelhofer Feld with an alternate view are not allowed to express their view on the park itself. Reading through their facebook feed for the past weeks is a collection of absurdism that beggars belief. Truth is stranger than fiction.

And now the city has started a campaign where they found people willing to shill for construction on the field in videos such as these:

They don’t mention how much these people have been paid for their participation. Maybe a human flesh search for these people would be a good idea to track them down and ask them what they really think.

Anyway the entire thing is turning into a travesty where capitalism and the corrupt local government get what they want regardless. There is a term for such an unholy alliance though it has fallen slightly out of use in Germany these past decades.

The Union issue

I have been long flummoxed by how terrible the CDU/CSU complex in Germany is. I could not understand how people could be that stupid and that conservative to the detriment of everybody including themselves. The number of examples is near infinite, but this post was prompted by yesterday’s action by the young Union Berlin1.

I now have a new working theory that explains this issue and sheds a new light on Germany.

Working theory: Most of the people from the Nazi party who weren’t shot after WWII went into the Union.2

I have not really heard anybody object to this and it really does explain a lot3. Those people had to go somewhere and I’m guessing they did not enter the socialist parties which were probably seeded from whatever red element survived the world wars.

This fact has shaped modern German politics from then on.

  1. Who will never ever demonstrate except at the opportune moment where they can celebrate the state’s boot crushing down on the poor and the oppressed. See this VICE report to see how incredibly fucked that situation is. []
  2. Cheeky corollary: More people from the Nazi party should have been shot. []
  3. Also these are the kind of theories that are not at all salonfähig in German pubs or academia. That’s why outsiders living in Germany need to formulate them. []

Unleash the panther

On Saturday evening I was in the Volksbühne for Stargaze among others to see Cantus Domus perform a set with an odd German band called 1000 Robota. After that there was an intermission and the main performance of the evening by Pantha du Prince and The Bell Laboratory.

Pantha du Prince & The Bell Laboratory

The artistic mandate of the evening bordered a bit on the odd. 1000 Robota is more or less a lunatic act part of the melodramatic German singer-songwriter movement. Pantha du Prince & The Bell Laboratory were forced to interpret Terry Riley’s in C as part of the program. Of course they said it was a great inspiration to them and they did quite a good job of it. After the official part of the program they started making some real music and the entire Volksbühne got to its feet1. I asked myself: ‘What the fuck were we doing up until this point?’

I realize that the evening wasn’t supposed to be a club night, but if the unofficial part of the program is so much more vibrant that should be a clear signal.

  1. I had a similar experience in the same venue where a performance by Apparat was mired by a boring play about Russian nobility. []

Germany still isn’t really a democracy

I tried to register to vote for the buyback of the Berlin energy grid and then I got this letter back informing me that I cannot vote.

IMG_0001

I already knew that I cannot vote for national German elections and I don’t care much for them anyway. That I can’t vote at the local level where I live and where I am taxed is however somewhat annoying. Especially given the number of new entrants to the city, the fact that none of them receive any representation for their taxation is a outrageous.

There’s a Turkish man who cycles around Berlin with a placard about this very fact1. He has a cassette tape to make his point and looks rather funny but the issue that he protests is real for many people. A lot of people who live in Germany for a long time have no say in what happens there. During the most recent elections the statistic was posted that a quarter of people living in Germany are not allowed to vote (because they are foreigners) and another quarter do not vote. This means the government has a shaky mandate based on half the inhabitants.

It could also explain why mainstream politics is so broken and boring. Maybe it’s time for some democracy in Germany?

  1. I’ll try to get a picture of him next time I see him. []

Week 335

A funny week and with these weeknotes falling ever further behind it is also becoming increasingly vague what ever did happen back then.

Something I didn’t publish back then but I might as well now is this horrible ancient picture that Peter dug up of me from a long ago visit to Berlin. That was in a certain year during the first Web 2.0 Expo that was held in Berlin by O’Reilly. We made it out here with a Dutch group and attended the event along with Barcamp Berlin and lots of parties. Fun times in a Berlin that was very different.

U bevindt zich hier - Cheeky Dutch colonization of Berlin

Also this week Cuppings was featured rather prominently both on twitter and in publications which all in all did not lead to the exponential sales you may have been expecting. It turns out that the visibility windows of twitter are too short to lead to any serious conversion.

We watched this rare talk by Jack Schulze which is recommended viewing.

“He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it.” —Schulze

And Kars was in Berlin so we iterated on the Cuppings game version which should be published somewhere in October for you all to play.