Over 9 weeks at home, there was a change of pace as daycare has re-opened. While welcome it also took some getting used to, having time to focus all of a sudden, and less interruptions in the home. It did not immediately transform into productivity, it also translated in taking some time to do my own thing, such as tinkering with a bit of code. It felt like a very unproductive week, but mostly as I measured it against the lack of progress of a single project that I should be focused on more than I was.

This week I

• Coded up a new rss feed for comments on this site
• Kept up keeping daily logs, for the third week in a row
• Made a ‘kanban’ style board for a project nearing a deadline, to get an overview of its various components and quircks. Used the new NextCloud Deck app for it, and it works well. Made working with a colleague on this way easier, cutting back on coordination time.
• Worked on the EU High Value Data study
• Celebrated my 50th birthday. E themed it ‘play (more)’ and gave me both a book about Play, and a Lego Boost robot to play with. I had a visit from my sister and brother in law who live nearby, and E’s brother. At the request of Y we had take-away pancakes for dinner. The evening we did a Zoom Trivial Pursuit game (with questions about me added) with dear friends in Switzerland. But the program then stretched out into the rest of the week. There was a ‘pubquiz’ on Wednesday with E’s entire family with questions about me and my birth year 1970. There was a ‘virtual escape room’ on Thursday with my colleagues, and an app-mediated scavenger hunt through our neighbourhood with my dear fried K on Saturday afternoon. Thank you E, and all!
• Received a mountain of Playmobil (12 kilos!) which will provide for Y’s birthday, and family members can subscribe to parts of it as their gift. The mountain is big enough to also cover for Sinterklaas in December I suspect.
• Worked on a provincial data publishing platform
• Spent quite a bit of time in my head on the fireworks disaster which was 20 years ago this Wednesday. That had been building in the week and a half before, after reading the now published diary from then by my friend Danny, in which I feature quite a bit.
• Went to the dentist for a next step in getting my implant tooth. Next stage in August, so for now it is done.
• Had some meetings with a provincial digital transformation team
• Had a meeting with Maltese civil servants on meteo data
• Discussed a EU project proposal with a client
• Wrote background material and sent it out for two online workshops I’m doing next week
• Participated in Oliver’s unconference, which was a good end to the work week and start of the weekend
• Got about half way in building a robot cat from the Lego kit I got, putting it together with Y