Our time in Germany is drawing to a close. Taavi made a calendar so he can mark off the days. I fogged my way through most of last week with a sinus infection, my first in quite some time. Through the miracle of modern medicine, it’s better now.
Even when I’m healthy, household conditions haven’t been favorable for me to work. To keep my head on straight, I pass the available non-kid time hacking on something or other open source: most often pkgsrc, but lately notqmail. pkgsrc is my sysadmin bread and butter, always repaying a bit more investment, but it’s about other people’s code and (in an extremely ambitious fashion) continuously integrating it. With notqmail, it’s our code, our software development process, our imagined future states, our working steps toward them. A couple bits of code I wanted to propose for inclusion needed their authors to relicense, which one already has and the other intends to. The next notqmail release with this code will suddenly offer lots of tools for mail administrators to filter the SMTP conversation. This is really basic stuff that modern Mail Transport Agents provide — nothing to write home about, except that we’ll have taken another step toward “modern” while preserving and extending qmail’s design. Another benefit of the aforementioned code is that it affords writing integrated tests. I’ve written some already, presumptively. This is legacy code and we need every available advantage.
Sometimes I live-stream my hacking sessions on Twitch (and then cache them on YouTube afterward). I arranged a decent broadcast studio here, backed by a green screen. I might get to do one more stream before we leave. Then probably a few weeks before I can think about getting back to it.
After enough expert advice and enough headspace, we’ve been adjusting our parenting approach with Taavi back toward our original preferences. It’s going better for him and for us. And we’ve had some breakthroughs in the nose-clearing department: iPad time is now simultaneously steam-and-spray-and-blow time. We hope this removes one of the remaining obstacles to sleep breakthroughs.
Finias has more and more words (phrases!) and opinions and speeds. It’s wonderful to watch the two of them amuse each other and love each other up. When they can do the same with their cousins, I expect to plotz further.
Taavi loves his “kindergarten” (preschool) here, and they love him right back. As sad as we and they are to say goodbye, we’re sure our time in Germany is over. We’ll visit often. We’ll always remember what an unusual and challenging time this was for all of us. Much to be sad about, but also much to be grateful for. We had reasons for wanting to live here for two years, and we accomplished those goals. It’s time now to put down our roots in New York.
What’s this?
It’s a
/now page.
nownownow.com
is a directory of people with /now pages.
I’m listed there.