Weeknotes 2026 W23: Squeeze

I’ve made a short trip to London to set up my temporary accommodation. I’ve dropped everything off and will soon return to Berlin to finish up the move. As Marlene Dietrich sings: Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin. That is what she meant… right?

My arrival in London coincided with Tube strikes, but I’ve been able to fall back to the Elizabeth line for what I needed to do. Viewings, primarily. I’m not back to work just yet; I need to finish my international move before I can put my energy back into the job.

I’ve been budgeting diligently, as this is such an expensive move, but ugh multi-currency budgeting (in EUR and GBP) is a giant pain. YNAB just doesn’t cut it. I don’t know how I’ll do my budgeting going forward. (I have been playing with Actual even though it does not have multi-currency support.)

Quick bits

• Once, after the end of a conversation, I realised I had absolutely no memory about the language that the conversation was held in. What is even more bizarre is that each language comes with such unique behavioural patterns, which makes this all the more bizarre that this happened.

• Sometimes I think back to waferbaby.com which was the first fully lowercase web site. It certainly had an aesthetic and I miss it.

• Only this week, I found out that my speakers have Bluetooth support, which makes it so much easier to play music from anywhere. The wireless future is here!

• If it rains in one place, and not in another, then it logically follows that there is a physical boundary that separates the “it rains” from the “it does not rain.” Just a few days ago, I could see that boundary so clearly: to the right of me, it was raining heavily, but everything to the left was almost dry. How strange.

• I thought I forgot the code to my suitcase’s combination lock — the code I thought I put in no longer worked. So I did what any reasonable person would do and taught myself to pick combination locks, until I realised that there is a little button on the side that needs to be pressed to disengage the lock. That did the trick for the combination I remembered.

• New Berlin S-Bahn line just dropped:

  

  Sadly, I’ll not be in Berlin anymore by the time this opens.

Squeezing past me

I know I’ve already complained about this sort of stuff ad nauseam, but I can still be surprised how bad people in Berlin are at just walking.

Here’s the situation from a few days ago: I’m pushing two heavy suitcases on a wide sidewalk. A woman is walking on the other side of the sidewalk in the opposite. Were we both to keep on walking straight, we’d pass each other with a wide margin.

But no: she switches sides, and ends up right in front of me. I’m thinking she needs my help (why would anyone get physically so uncomfortably close otherwise?), but she’s not making eye contact and not saying anything — just standing right in front of me, visibly annoyed, looking at my body, my limbs, my suitcases, and then she squeezes tightly past me — on a sidewalk so wide that it could comfortably fit ten people next to each other. Just bizarre.

She needed to get to the pedestrian crossing, you see, and on that straight path to that pedestrian crossing, there just happened to be… me.

This was an exceptionally bizarre case, but this shit happens so often in Berlin. Shoving people out of the way is straight up antisocial behaviour, and I despise it.

This desire to go in the shortest path also explains why many bicyclists cycle against the direction of traffic. I’ve even seen car drivers drive on the wrong side of the road, which is freaky as hell when you’re using a pedestrian crossing at green and a car pops out of nowhere and cuts you off. This kills people.

At least this time I didn’t get insults hurled at me, or punched, right?

The antisocial chaos gotten so much worse over the last five years, and it is a large reason why I’m leaving Berlin.

Links

• The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum (Rabbit Hole)

• Every interview with a tech CEO (Eleanor Morton): Accurate.

Tech links:

• My Software North Star (Loris Cro): I mostly agree, but I also think software can also just be fun to mess around with; it’s entirely fine for software to exist as an experiment or just as hack project for the satisfaction of the developer.

• Scoped Commits: I do this and it’s nice!