Thursday, Pepe's birthday

content/blog/wk5day4.md

@@ -1,7 +1,101 @@
 ---
-title: "Week 5, Thursday:"
+title: "Week 5, Thursday: Pepe"
 date: 2024-08-29T21:55:00+02:00
-draft: true
 ---
 
-{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/todo.png" alt="Credit: " >}}
+{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/ben-c-kalsx-live.png" alt="Credit: Ben C and Kalsx Live, Youtube" >}}
+
+My parents in law, Jean-Paul and Nicole, have their birthday two days apart, Nicole on the 27th and
+JP on the 29th of August. Sometimes, Nicole would call Marina on the phone with a "hey don't forget
+your dad's birthday tomorrow", eliciting some guilt-filled "oopsie" on the part of Marina. But, this
+year, we forgot neither birthday!! 
+
+In the morning, post-brunch truffles are served. These belgian pralines are pretty great, so I
+cheers Marina who has a dark one while I choose a white chocolate one. A truffle a day, ..! After
+the brunch I ask Marina if she's willing to bring me to the datacenter, because parking in the
+daytime can be quite difficult, but I figured if she is willing to circle the block a few times, I
+can retrieve the IP-Max treasure. And thus, we went on our way to arrive at the datacenter only to
+find that (a) there were plenty of parking spots available and (b) the local parking police were
+writing out oodles of tickets to folks who had parked either too long, or didn't pay, or were not
+neatly parked in their respective parking bay. This is Switzerland, people, and we like our cars
+parked orderly, and our bundles of paper bound neatly, thank you.
+
+I casually schlepp two ASR9001s, an ASR920, a Cisco 2960 switch, a handfull of CWDM muxes, and two
+APC power strips out of this facility.  I have accumulated so many horror stories, from being denied
+access, being locked up on the floor, but overall somehow even after eighteen years of access, every
+other time its "you do not appear to have access to this location" followed by a 45 minute
+song-and-dance with escalations, and somehow magically "oh yes, here you are" is the result, full
+biometrics have to be redone, a new badge needs to be created - because this has only happened
+thirty times before. A smile on my face appears as it will be unlikely that I ever have to step
+foot in this particular building again. By the way, I hear - from employees that work here - that
+this datacenter company is the best company in the world - did you know??
+
+Bon, bloodpressure lowered as I put the equipment in an ever growing stah of IP-Max equipment in the
+IPng Networks carrier hotel - all of this stuff is slated to deploy later: these ASR9001s and
+assorted equipment will go to _Stollen_ in Luzern in September, while the bigger ASR9010 will go
+live a productive life in Frankfurt in October. Marina is pouting as I put stacks on stacks of
+equipment, but I know that deep down inside, she possibly still loves me.
+
+To take our minds off of the enormous stack of nerd, we go to a local Portugese winebar, where we
+sit outside on the patio and order a jug of white Sangria. To nosh a little bit, we also order house
+made tapanade and some olives and bread. We spend a while watching the world slide by on the road
+and roundabout here, and overall I find it incredibly relaxing. We'll be taking the bus home, so no
+need to rush: the busstop is literally across the street from the terrace.
+
+The Sangria is nice for a summers' day, and I find it easy to convince Marina to have some in the
+back yard later. What is a bit more difficult, is to convince her that my iPhone's selfie camera is
+so much better than her Samsung one. It's because her argument is that holding the phone (with a pop
+on the back) and being able to move the shutter button on the screen, makes it much easier to take
+pictures -- especially if you have nails. My argument is: eff that, press harder and with your thumb
+at a 112 degree angle, and benefit from the pixels and sharpness of the iPhone. We're both
+wondering: the selfie of us down below: was it made by iPhone or Samsung? No peeking at EXIF!
+
+After our delectable Ap&eacute;ro, we make our way back home with the bus and start at dinner. In my
+household, there's a pernnial disagreement on the potato krokettes: I really like them to be
+hashbrown or r&ouml;sti style (as pictured here), and Marina/Quinn prefer the softer _Duchesse_
+style. Leave a comment down below to let me know what your opinion is. Oh, wait...
+
+We chop up a bunch of garden vegetables and yeet them in the steam oven, and Nicole makes some
+delicious turkey filet, nicely seasoned and very tender. Yum! After the dinner, one last thing comes
+up, a birthday "cake", although Marina does not think it's much of a cake, JP and I do! It's a
+_Quarktorte_ (sort of a cheese cake, not baked). My bigger issue is that I find raisins in the cake.
+Luckily they are in the bottom, so I muster the mental strength to consume a piece (which, I cannot
+tell a lie, is actually very good despite the polution).
+
+Then at 8pm, just as I'm moving the last bite of cake into my face, Tim pings me on Telegram
+"meeting time!". The [[Coloclue](https://coloclue.net/)] association has a monthly meeting with the
+network and systems admin committee, of which I am a member. Very glad I went, because we had a full
+contingent, everybody came, including two new folks: Jaap and Erwin, who are looking to chip in and
+join the team. We talk about bits and bobs, a new set of core switches, some action items (including
+a new OOB platform, and upgrading our VPP routers from Debian Bullseye to Bookworm), and our desire
+to deploy Akvorado with VPP -- which reminds me of an ongoing thread with the folks from
+[[Inmon](https://inmon.com/)] about their proof of concept to add _sflow_ to VPP, which excites
+Rogier and me greatly. We immediately make a date: September 6th, we'll take the code out for a
+spin, possibly seeing if/when/how we might deploy this to the routers at Coloclue. Considering the
+machines will have to reboot with the Debian upgrade, that would be an excellent time to add or
+remove VPP plugins as well, limiting the number of dataplane restarts to, essentially, one. By the
+way, VPP is running pretty well at Coloclue AS8283. The last dataplane restart was on March 5th when
+there was a power failure at the facility and up ever since.
+
+I have to say, my favorite part about the meeting is the _afterparty_. We get to know each other,
+ask curious questions of Jaap and Erwin, and I crack open a bottle of Rioja (a _Gran Reserva_ cuz I
+ain't playing around), and all of the sudden it's 1am. This suits me fine as I will be gearing up
+for a night shift this Saturday at Zurich Open Air (which is slated to run until about 3am). After a
+fun evening of catching up and making new play dates for Coloclue, I turn in a happy camper after a
+quick midnight snack (of cup-a-noodles).
+
+## Pictures of the Day
+
+{{< gallery-category >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0896.JPG" caption="Marina and I cheers with a truffle in the morning. As the famous saying goes: One truffel a day, keeps the doctor gay!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0901.JPG" caption="Marina chauffeurs me to the datacenter in Zurich where I decommissioned stuff yesterday, to pick up the equipment. Nice trolly!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0903.JPG" caption="(part of) the haul for IP-Max: a few muxes, two ASR9001s, a Cisco 2960G and an ASR920. I think I'll loadtest this stuff later!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0904.JPG" caption="In the afternoon we take an apero with white-wine Sangria at a local Portugese watering hole" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0908.JPG" caption="We have some tapanade and olives with this rather delicious sangria" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/selfie.png" caption="Marina and I have an argument over whose cellphone takes better selfies. Mine has a better camera, but hers has a pop so you can hold it more comfortably. We agree to disagree." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0910.JPG" caption="In the evening, we eat fried turkey with steamed veggies and r&ouml;sti kroketten. Lekker!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0911.JPG" caption="As desert, Pepe requested (and therefor, got served) a Quarktorte, which had raisins :(" >}}
+{{< /gallery-category >}}
+
+{{< gallery-modal >}}
+{{< gallery-script >}}

content/gallery.md

@@ -325,6 +325,14 @@ menu:
   {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-28/IMG_0890.JPG" caption="Dinner - buffalo mozarella with beefy tomatoes, much like yesterday." >}}
   {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-28/IMG_0892.JPG" caption="Dinner - Beef Tartar, with toast, egg and red onion." >}}
   {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-28/IMG_0893.JPG" caption="I click a few trillion cookies for Quinn." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0896.JPG" caption="Marina and I cheers with a truffle in the morning. As the famous saying goes: One truffel a day, keeps the doctor gay!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0901.JPG" caption="Marina chauffeurs me to the datacenter in Zurich where I decommissioned stuff yesterday, to pick up the equipment. Nice trolly!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0903.JPG" caption="(part of) the haul for IP-Max: a few muxes, two ASR9001s, a Cisco 2960G and an ASR920. I think I'll loadtest this stuff later!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0904.JPG" caption="In the afternoon we take an apero with white-wine Sangria at a local Portugese watering hole" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0908.JPG" caption="We have some tapanade and olives with this rather delicious sangria" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/selfie.png" caption="Marina and I have an argument over whose cellphone takes better selfies. Mine has a better camera, but hers has a pop so you can hold it more comfortably. We agree to disagree." >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0910.JPG" caption="In the evening, we eat fried turkey with steamed veggies and r&ouml;sti kroketten. Lekker!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-29/IMG_0911.JPG" caption="As desert, Pepe requested (and therefor, got served) a Quarktorte, which had raisins :(" >}}
 {{< /gallery-category >}}
 
 ### Playing with OBS sound (August 8th)