#weeklyreview 06/2025

Again a mixed week

Took Monday off to drive a friend to an examiner for his insurance to assess that he’s not capable of working in his job. He’s got severe ME/CFS, can’t sit or stand upright without passing out in a matter of minutes, has the attention span of squirrel before his brain fog kicks in etc. The examination was originally meant to be 2 days of 4 hours examinations each. But it was clear from the start that he’d not be able to do that. The bloody examiner sit’s in a non-accessible building in the south of Berlin. My friends needs a wheelchair to move around. Of course the building neither had an elevator nor a ramp or something. So it took my friend about 25 minutes to rob in his bum up to the 3rd floor. Yeah… because he can’t stand upright and just walk. And he’s also a bit heavy so can’t be easily carried. And our brilliant health system also does not pay for transport and carrying him upstairs anymore. You’d need three persons to move him, but the default staff on official ambulance cars is only two.

Overall a rather humiliating and exhausting experience for him. I’ll just hope that he’ll finally get’s the deserved payout from his insurance.

The good thing was though, that I 4 hours to roam around in Friedenau and was able to give my good friend Boerge as visit in his new home

Tuesday & Wednesday I was fighting with work bureaucrats the get an exemption for using my corporate USB Disks to free off space on my internal hard disk for experiments mit LLM models. I get the need for rules and restrictions etc. But there must be a way to not prevent people from doing their work. There is all this mandatory security training and tools etc. But I think there should be a way for people to somehow prove that they know what they’re doing and get rid of the usual corporate shackles that prevent you from doing stuff and cripple your expensive corporate hardware.

Baltic Sea

For the rest of the week (which was the Berlin winter holiday week for schools) my daughter and me took off to Usedom island. This time we stayed in Świnoujście on the polish side of the isle.

The weather left room for improvement the first two days with grey clouds, cold wind and drizzle. But that’s kind of what we came for. The sea is awesome at any weather and our hotel had a Spa area where we spent time in the pool and sauna I also got a fair bit of reading done on my kindle in the sauna. “The dawn of everything” is really good.

We explored the local restaurants and roamed around the city, beach and piers a bit.

On Saturday we took a trip to the German side and payed Gulliver a visit and had good pizza on the pier restaurant in Heringsdorf.

In the afternoon the sun finally came out and people were flocking to the beach for a walk. We saw the TF Line ferries coming in and eventually had really good Sushi at the Hilton Hotel Sushi Bar and Grill.

Overall a rather relaxing four days at the Baltic Sea.

But there was not a single #meshtastic node on the whole Baltic Sea. I was carrying my T-Echo the whole time to check for any nearby radios. Nothing, nada, zilch.