Holiday Season

The first days of the 2018 Holiday season are over, tomorrow is a normal day and even though most people are still off work, shops will re-open.

There’s still a lot of time until Three Kings (January 6), when most people will return to work and everyday life commences – time for friends and family, time to reflect, to rest and to regroup, and time to check on last year’s resolution (that’ll be a separate blog post / video though).

The coming days for me will be full of work, winding my freelance consulting business down, as I will return to being an employee on January 1st; I’ll stay with the same consultancy though, so it’s more of a legal and status change than an actual change of workplace.

In December there were a huge number of YouTubers who did Vlogmas – to name a few, celebrities like Johnny Orlando or my favorite LGBTQ+ activist, Jackson Bird (if you haven’t watched his TED Talk or any of his videos on what being trans actually means, do that now!) – it was a real joy to watch the stories unfold as December progressed.

Thanks a lot to all the creators that went out of their way to produce daily content for us – deeply appreciated!

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Pre-Holidays Movie Spree

In the week before the holidays I went on a movie spree – the past weeks had been quite intense and I didn’t find any time, so as the year’s winding down, it was time to catch up.

I got to see:

  • Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse,
  • Aquaman,
  • Mary Poppins Returns and
  • Bumblebee.

Mary Poppins Returns is a great remake of the original, musical style, with singing leeries doing parkour; might be boring for kids under the age of 50.

Aquaman is solid action fare, but not something really new.

Bumblebee is a great prequel to the Transformers series, with B-127 as a cute beetle saving the world and setting the stage for the series.

Spiderman though was something entirely different – completely new universes, complete new set of characters, including a spider-pig named Peter Porker; I’m looking forward to more of Miles’ adventures on the big screen!

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2019 Hello – Google Tasks

Now that there’s room on my phone for a new app, time to start using Google Tasks!

It syncs quite nicely to Outlook, courtesy of gSyncit and works very well on the web (I.e. in Gmail) and on my phone. It does help to have a single, comprehensive list of tasks and deadlines, both for your private and professional lives.

I do hope that Tasks will have a longer lifespan than G+ or Inbox though – Inbox I’ll really miss when it goes away in spring

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2018 Goodbye – Snapchat

One application will not make it on my phone into 2019, and that’s Snapchat.

I’ve never gone back to regularly using after the rather awful redesign, and Instagram stories have by now not only caught up, but surpassed Snapchat’s to a great length.

For the last couple of months, I didn’t touch it at all, so now it became time to remove it completely.

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Happy Holidays!

Today is Winter solstice, the shortest day of the year – from tomorrow onwards, it will be getting brighter every day

I’m quite happy about the quiet time between the years, time to reconnect with friends and family, and relax a bit from the daily grind; I’ve bought all presents, finished all work tasks, a bit of cleaning in the morrow and I’m all set

I wish all of you a joyful time and all the best for the new year!

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Rancher Rodeo

On Monday, December 10, we had the fourth Rancher Rodeo this year, focusing on the new 2.x branch of software and Kubernetes container orchestration.

We had a good sized crowd and guest speakers from our partners NeuVector and Cologne Intelligence, all in all a very successful afternoon.

If you’re not sure what Rancher is – it’s a tool, or better, the tool, to manage multiple Kubernetai in the Enterprise – https://rancher.com/

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Learning

For the first time in 36 years, I’m at home, learning for a written exam in business information systems.

Not that I ever stopped learning or sitting exams, for Novell Netware, Cisco or more recently for Suse, but this was all related to my daily work; if you’ve ever sat a Novell or Cisco exam, you’ll know that there’s a lot of memorizing and intense preparation involved.

This time though, I need to memorize content from the 90s, and I’m having a hard time …

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Bloom: 10 Worlds

Generative Music have re-released Brian Eno’s Bloom music creation app, now finally for Android!

In addition to the original, there are 10 new worlds to explore, each with different sounds, shapes and colors.

Highly recommended and fun to use!

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Hatsune Miku

Yesterday we went to a concert by Hatsune Miku, a quite famous Japanese singer; she’s on her first tour in Europe and it was her first concert in Germany. Luckily for us, she chose the LANXESS Arena in Cologne as the venue, which made it quite easy for us.

Hatsune came with a couple of her friends for support, Kaito, Meiko, Megurine Luka and the Kagamine twins.

Almost everybody in the arena had her signature Glowsticks, so the colors from stage spread throughout – very special.

The concert itself was great, wonderful song selection and a stellar stage show – I really hope she’ll come back to Cologne soon!

Needless to say that she made a very nice attempt to welcome us in German . Smile

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