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Friday: Sushi and Dougie	2024-08-02T22:27:18+02:00			false

Morning

{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/dancekowski.png" alt="Credit: Andre Dancekowski at Hör Berlin, YouTube" >}}

Yaay, overnight Tim has committed his travel and will be staying at my place from Sep 30 through Oct 4, and he'll be taking the night train over - so grab your laptop and a movie or two, Tim, and I'll see you before then at the FrysIX barbecue on Sep 14th. I'm looking forward to visiting Jubbega in the beautiful province of Friesland in the Netherlands. For some reason, I made it to 2am again yesterday, after writing my journal entry - I made some spicy noodles and added some extra spices.

This morning I woke up to a second burn, and because I did not set an alarm, it was about 10:30 or so when I woke up from the beeping sounds of the mailman delivering packages downstairs. No packages for me today, although I am expecting one from Digitec tomorrow.

We were going to have lunch at Bagle Boys in Oerlikon, but Quinn can't make it beacuse Liv is coming over. It's all mayhem on the rails though, as some train has ripped through the electic overhead lines and made some gnarly damage. It's easy to take for granted, but we do have an electric railway system here. No stinky (and loud!) diesel guzzling trains over here! Because of this stressful bit, Liv will be at our place later, so Marina and I decide to jet.

Afternoon

For me the day starts at Yooji's in Glatt Zentrum, a local shopping mall a few kilometers from where we live. Marina wants to do some specialy shopping, getting those types of ingredients and condiments that you can't find at our local Coop or Migros. But considering it's lunch time, we treat ourselves to some sushi at Yooji's. Marina marvels at the variety of dishes on the sushi-train, that are normally not available when we go there at dinner time. She quite enjoys herself, including taking home three Mochi (green tea, vanilla and Oreo) for later.

I come home and remind myself that I was going to be baking bread during my sabbatical. I start two starter cultures from a little bit of yeast I had lying around in the fridge. Why buy blocks of yeast, if you can keep an evergrowing culture? I create one and lovingly call it Dougie. I used to have a california sourdough culture called Dougzilla, but sadly he got infected a few years ago, and I tossed it. This one only has to last for a few months though.

Downstairs I am reminded of another (somewhat more annoying) thing: the reason why I have this clothing closet in my basement workroom. Marina wanted to get rid of it when we moved into the house, mostly because its drawers kept on drooping open. But for a storage cabinet in my room, I thought it was not just good, but good enough (hoi, North of the Border!). Now is the time to fix that shit! I whip out Fusion360, and I grin seeing how blazingly fast this runs on the M2 Ultra with 24 cores and 64GB of memory. I draw a few pieces that are supposed to hold 20x10x2mm neodymium magnets. They are quickly printed and while the second batch is printing, I bike over to Jumbo to get some smaller 2x10mm screws, as I dond't want to push through the drawer fronts. Back home, the print is finished, and the drawers are quickly magnetically closed and tucked away.

{{< image frame="false" width="5em" float="left" src="/img/init/sidequest.png" alt="The SideQuest logo" >}}

But what is this I see? Crap, junk and more debris in all of these drawers. Something in me is a bit addicted to cleaning up by now ... so I decide to weed through all of these things, and find eleven 24V power bricks (for Mikrotik's CRS305 switch), a bunch of LSI raid and IT HBAs from when I was scratchbuilding my storage tanks, a few dozen NICs (including a few 25G and 100G ones, nice!), and many many, many patch cables. I do the nerdy #OCD thing and sort each cable by type (multimode, singlemode), connector (LC/PC, SC/PC, LSH/APC, and MPO) and length (I have 50cm, 1m, 1.5m, 2m, 2.5m and 3m). I also make note of a few attenuators which I just knew I had, but at some point lost track of. Nice work, Pim! Of course, this takes way longer than I had originally planned to spend time on, but a good few hours later, and every cable is accounted for and sorted.

Evening

Liv is still hanging out with Quinn and she'll stay for dinner. Marina and I cut a boatload of green stringbeans, and we're smug because we got a few sausages from our local Coop -- they have a promotion where you get scratch tickets to win stuff. So our protein tonight will be at a good rebate -- as a proud Dutchman I can't say I would reject free stuff. Hah, maybe that's why I had so much crap in my basement?

We make dinner and chat with Quinn and Liv at the table. I like Liv, she's chatty and funny. After dinner, I drive her to Winterthur train station because there are still delays beacuse of the overhead powerline failiure earlier today. I make my way to the station, kick her out, and Quinn and I make the 15min drive back home. We watch the penultimate Stranger Things episode, and when Quinn takes off (trying to re-adjust to early wakeup after his vacation break), Marina and I watch one more episode of Dear Child on Netflix. The plot there is thickening!

I make myself a mug of tea from the house of Mariage Fréres, a brand of tea that my buddy Fred introduced me to when we were in Paris last year. It's super delicious! While I listen to Andre Dancekowski at the Hör in Berlin, I first do a little bit of feature work on this website: I add a Hugo shortcode for Asciinema, so that I can simply host any asciinema recordings directly on the site using a tag like {{</* asciinema src="/foo/bar.cast" */>}} and see it automatically load the player and so on. I'm slowly starting to learn the ropes in Hugo, and I intend on replacing Jekyll with it on [IPng.ch]. So far, I am very pleased with the elegance and simplicity, although the templating language is taking a bit of getting used to.

It's now 23:35 and I've finished with that feature and written the article for today. Tomorrow I get to cash in my Bagle Boys raincheck, and we're also going out to dinner at night, sort of a celebration at the end of Quinn's vacation. Maybe tomorrow afternoon then I will take that GOWIN rack mountable N305 router (with 2x25G, 2x2.5G and 3x1G + POE) out for a spin. I paid the import duties for it, after all :)

Pictures of the Day

{{< gallery-category >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0474.JPG" caption="Marina and I went out to lunch in Glattzentrum, we had sushi from Yooji" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0475.JPG" caption="I had a bit of sashimi, which was really tasty" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0479.JPG" caption="This drawer is the reason why Marina gave me this closet, some 8 years ago. It is time to fix this bug! While I was here, I weeded through all 8 drawers, sorted the contents in keep versus toss, and ended up with two empty drawers!" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/stopper.png" caption="I drew a few magnet holding brackets in Fusion360" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0480.JPG" caption="And then I printed a few magnet holding brackets on the Prusa Mk3" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0481.JPG" caption="Some one hundred fiber optic cables, many different lengths, multimode and singlemode, MPO as well as just normal LC/PC and some older SC/PC and E2000 cables." >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0482.JPG" caption="I sorted all of the SMF patch cables in lengths, from 50cm, 1m, 1.5m, 2m, 2.5m and 3m in length" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0483.JPG" caption="While I was working, I also started a yeast culture, lovingly named it Dougie, and intend to bake some bread in the upcoming period!" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-08-02/IMG_0484.JPG" caption="With the magnetic drawer stoppers in place, and all the cables sorted by length, I am done with this task." >}} {{< /gallery-category >}}

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