Monthly, 06/24

TL;DR: Began working less, which was weird. Some progress on renovation work, and I gave helix another try. Which was kind of weird, but also rewarding.

My work week changed, beginning with June. From the first of June until the end of August (potentially until the end of September, but that’s not certain yet) I will only work four days a week, instead of the usual five.

The reason for that is simple: I’m bad at taking days off. I’m not good at vacationing, since I neither like travelling all that much, nor am I particularly good at changes to my regular schedule. Given that I have been in continuous full-time employment for close to 15 years, that part of my life is indeed very regular.

Buuuuut employers tend to get uncomfortable when you start amassing significant amounts of days off, so I ended up with this. Instead of a long summer vacation, I’ll be working less days per week throughout summer.

It’s too early to reasonably comment on how this feels, but preliminary examination tells me: Good. It’s “scheduled” enough for my spicy brain to not be bothered by it, and it’s one more day per week that I can spend (more or less) entirely on myself. I haven’t done anything wild yet, but having coffee with myself without the need to worry about time or other appointments is a quality of life improvement that I could get used to.

Speaking of improvements: Work on my storage room / future office space didn’t progress as much as I had hoped. There wasn’t anything specific that went wrong, or any particular interrupt blocking the efforts. Progress was simply slower than anticipated.

While all of the furniture has successfully been dismantled, the walls have only been stripped of the old wallpaper, but nothing more has been done. My original plan was to simply paint over the bare walls.

However, as I discovered after removing the wallpaper, that wouldn’t be a good idea because there already are several layers of paint between the wallpaper and the wall. Which means that I have to remove the old paint first, something that’s remarkably time consuming.

There are also some issues with the floor, because when this room was furnished, it was done in a way where the flooring was installed around the furniture. Not underneath it. Which means that I now have to find a way to fill significant gaps. But: It’s still progress, and that’s worth something.

I also happened to, accidentally, make some progress on another front. While I still feel like the most incompetent person that’s out there, I did spent more time writing code during the past month than I usually tend to, and I have been enjoying it (for the most part).

Ironically, the reason I ended up doing that was frustration that I couldn’t write code - because the one I had already written didn’t work. One night at the beginning of June I was frustrated with some code I produced. It didn’t do what I wanted it to do, but I was not able to find out why that was the case.

I was quite sure that I wouldn’t be able to debug it that night, but I was absolutely certain that I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while if I decided to go to bed in that frustrated state. So I browsed the Internet, looking for something else to do in order to pass the time.

One of the open tabs in my ever growing list of “That looks interesting, I’ll read this ’later’"-tabs was a blog post about recent developments surrounding Helix, a vim-esque modal editor.

I have toyed around with it for an evening before , but didn’t really give it a proper try. With a “Oh, what the heck” I installed it and configured alias vim=hx in my shell configuration.

Aside from the fact that learning something new is always fun, I enjoy the ride so far. I get a very similar feeling to vim, but without the decades of development history and (sometimes) arcane-seeming development decisions.

I spent a prolonged weekend in Hamburg at the end of the month, together with my partner. I’m personally not one for city trips, and I’ve been to Hamburg before several times. I’m also bad at taking about travel, so .. it was nice, I guess?

In all honesty, as much as I enjoyed time away from the day-to-day life with a loved one, the thing I enjoyed the most was the (roughly) ten hour train ride in both directions. It was pretty darn nice to get so much time in one sitting that I could dedicated to reading. Hence, without further ado, my reading for June:

  • “The Future of War: A History” by Lawrence Freedman is a beautiful book. I’m not talking about the cover or the typography, but the language Freedman uses. It’s not an easy read, even if you’re in general pretty capable when it comes to reading English, but .. look, I know it’s a book. And I know that it sounds kind of odd, because it potentially distracts from the serious topic the book covers, but at times it feels like a work of linguistic art.

    Other than that the biggest takeaway for me was that mankind is exceptionally good at waging war against each other, all the while being really, really bad when it comes to scientifically exploring war, warfare and the history of warfare.

  • “Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back” by Oliver Bullough instantly catapulted a certain song by the Cock Sparrer back into my mind. I can’t decide if I’m happy that I read the book, since it highlighted certain aspects of - for lack of a better term - “global kleptocracy” that I wasn’t fully aware of, or if I regret reading the book for the exact same reason. Either way, engaging read.

  • I read “Kleptopia” by Tom Burgis directly after “Moneyland”, which turned out to be a good thing. Where Moneyland gives an overview of the situation with a few examples here and there, this book focusses on a few specific examples with occasional explanations of the general trends or events that they highlight.

    My immediate thought after finishing this book was: “Man, this world and this society is completely fucked. And so are we.”

  • “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data” by Micah Lee does something that I have been waiting for ever since I got interested in computer investigations.

    Most books are either about the technical part of investigations - such as OSINT, scripting tasks or digital forensics - or the investigative part of .. well, investigations. This book manages to talk about both.

    If you don’t have a technical background it might be quite the steep learning curve, but definitely doable. If you have a technical background then you learn a lot of new tricks, as well as how to apply the things you already know to investigations.

  • “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo; I’m a bit torn on the book - which is probably what the author intended. If you read the book like you would read a textbook, then you are probably going to be disappointed.

    If you approach the book like you would approach a column in a magazine like The Financial Times or The Guardian, then it’s a rewarding read. It’s hard for me to comment on what the author says in the book, because I lack the knowledge of both the economic and the social aspects of the subejct matter. But it got me interested in reading more about the issues with economic aid, with “Aid And Other Dirty Business” by Giles Bolton already in my (metaphorical) sights.

  • “Soldaten - Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben” by Sönke Neitzel, Harald Welzer sounded interesting, but unfortunately suffered from a severely misplaced focus that somewhat ruined the book for me.

    Instead of focussing on the conversations between the German prisoners of war the authors focussed on the historic setting and contextualization, usually going for citing one or two short exchanges in an entire chapter of 30+ pages.

    Additionally the writing was way dried than I had to be. I accept and understand that scientific writing sometimes has to be hard to read, that there are situations where readibility has to be sacrificed in order to meet scientific standards. But during some parts I was of the impression that the authors deliberately decided to make it a boring read.

  • “Das Schattenregime” by Christian Neef was more depressing than I anticipated it to be. What happened in the Soviet occupied zone of Germany after World War II isn’t a secret.

    However, being shown so clearly how the cruel, corrupt and broken system of Soviet shadow governance lives on in modern Russia makes the events in Ukraine even more depressing than they already are.

  • “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe - The Troubles are a conflict that fascinates me ever since I first learned about it as a kid. Whenever I got the chance, I read books about it, and documentaries covering the history of Northern Ireland have accompanied long gaming sessions a lot of times.

    Because of this I was well aware of the basic events surrounding the kidnapping / disappearance of Jean McConville. It was a very sad case, one of the many crimes perpetrated by paramilitaries throughout The Troubles. Which means that I was curious how the author would go about filling the full length of a book with information about this case, without being repetitive or things becoming boring.

    Yet, despite my sceptisism, the author succeeded. The book was good, and very much not what I expected. It was also the first time I read about the psychological impact and damage the surviving perpetrators had to deal with. I’m not here to argue about morality, but I think it’s sad that it’s a topic that has barely received any research attention.

    If you’re interested in this period of history, read this book. Especially if you have some previous knowledge. There’s a lot to learn here. Specifically how you can get away with a lot of things by simply sticking to the blatant lie statement that you’ve never been in the IRA, thus you couldn’t have been responsible for any of their crimes. Looking at you, Gerry Adams.

  • “Industry of Anonymity Inside the Business of Cybercrime” by Jonathan Lusthaus is one of the few books about cybercrime that takes a methodifc, sociological approach to investigating how cybercrime works, and how cybercrime actors interact - among each other, and with more traditional crime structures.

  • “Russia’s Wars in Chechnya” by Mark Galeotti - I “read” this as an audiobook. Sometimes having trouble sleeping helps immensely with reading progress. Excellent introductory summary of most aspects of the Chechen Wars.

I more or less accidentally added a large number of Vaporwave albums to my collection this month, which are now providing most of the background sound while I’m working. Still, there was other excellent stuff I discovered as well:

  • The place where I sourced “On Growth and Form” by Pleasurekraft from catalogued it as “Electronic”, which isn’t wrong, because it is electronic music. However, that description completely negates the various other influences included on this album. Spoken word, Jazz, even some Classic elements. Unexpected combination, which I highly enjoyed.

  • “UNICORN” by Gunship is very much what I expected it to be. I was surprised how the comparatively many collaborations changed the sound - in a good way. I mean, they had John Carpenter (the man, the myth, the legend) himself contribute. You can never go wrong with that.

  • I’m not a Pop person, but “Timeless” by Meghan Trainor was 🔥.