Another year, another visit to the old colleagues in Utrecht and a nice opportunity to lock myself up in a hotel room to make some noise. Unfortunately, my default hotel in Utrecht seems to have two parts.. a more modern front side which has all the amenities like air conditioning, but it’s a bit noisy, because of people gathering in front of the KFC downstairs. The back part is a lot quieter, because it opens up to a back yard shared with a couple of apartments, but those rooms don’t have air conditioning and with the humid heat this summer, the stay was slightly strenuous.

But, I got away from everyday chores at home, had a nice dinner with the folks and even got some music done 🙂

In addition to that, I finally got to see the Domtoren without the scaffolding, it’s been in for the whole time I lived in Utrecht and I made a nice day trip to Rotterdam to visit the Dutch Pinball Museum, which was great. You don’t get to see many pinball machines these days in the first place, but the thing I hate about them is that you hardly get to see much of the game, because your quarter is long gone before you got anywhere. 🙂

At pinball museums, the machines are usually in free play mode, so you get to play as long as you want(or the queue behind you lets you) and you can actually make some progress and experience the great story-telling in many of these games. And the multiple storeys at the museum in Rotterdam were even greater than the smaller venue we visited in Amersfoort last year.. The number of machines seemed similar to the museum in Schwerin, Germany, but the selection was slightly better.. I basically got to play the real-world version of every machine I own in the Pinball FX3 game.

And of course, I did a little walking around in Rotterdam, which I never got around to while living in Utrecht.. I did visit Rotterdam by velomobile, but I never really explored much beyond the cube houses and the “Buttplug gnome”. Something I always found a bit unfortunate, because my initial plan was to move to Rotterdam and I “ended up” in Utrecht, which proved to be unexpectedly great.

Due to the heat, I spent most of the time in my hotel room, enjoying the quiet and learning the ins and outs of some of my music equipment, though.

I’m not usually someone to celebrate birthdays, stemming from my rather sub-par coming of age.. But I started missing my cool colleagues from my job in the Netherlands, so I decided to invite them to a night out and boy was it a good decision. 🙂

I’m not going into too much detail here.. I just enjoyed being in Utrecht for a couple of days again and met up with the colleagues at Daebak BBQ for a nice, flat-rate dinner and since we haven’t seen each other for a while, most of the Utrechters agreed to join me on visiting the Pinball Lounge in Amersfoort the following day.

Aah, the wondrous world of AWS and it’s time-based billing…

A couple of jobs back, we were working on transforming a big legacy application to run as a cloud-based service, AWS being the cloud provider of choice.

So far, so good.. One day, I was trying to make sure some of the legacy SPOFs were able to migrate freely between availability zones(multi-AZ EBS volumes weren’t a thing back then). The idea was quite nifty, I thought.. Using the Data Lifecycle Manager to create snapshots of each data volume, so the last snapshot won’t be more than 2hrs old (the minimum snapshot interval at the time) and then do a final snapshot and recreate the volume in the correct AZ in case an EC2 instance switched AZs.

So there I went and wrote up a Lambda function that could be triggered by the EC2 startup and shutdown hooks and it would halt the machine, make sure the volume is available in the right AZ and continue the boot. After a couple of tries it all worked reasonably well and I decided to give it a try on one of our development environments that were shut down every night and I was expecting to see some AZ movements there..

And after applying the terraform code, I found a log message that could be more helpful and adjusted it manually, as you sometimes do. I called it a day and went on to do something different the next day.. At the end of the next day, I finally came around to fixing the log message in the code and apply it to the environment.

Now.. A couple of days later, my manager came up to the team to ask about the 3000 dollars in logging cost that ran up within just a day and upon investigation, we found out that is was my Lambda :D

Usually, ordering a new EC2 instance and waiting for it to boot feels like it takes forever, but somehow, halting an instance, having a Lambda function throw a Python stacktrace and discarding the instance to try again is fast enough to rack up a couple of thousand of dollars in Cloudwatch logging :D

While I was just writing about my tent-friendly colleague, I got an invitation to his surrogate stag party. Since he’s a little more outdoor-sy like me and less of the party-going type, we did a little less drinking and a little more hiking up one of the highest mountains of Northern Germany, the Brocken in the Harz mountains(although it only is 1141 metres above sea level).

I have fond memories of the area, because it was customary for schools in my home town to do one or two week-long excursions to the area, but today’s sight is a little different. Less of the lush greenery of my youth and more of the effects of decades of monoculture and beetle infestations, but at least the old steam train is as idyllic as it was back then.

I’m not the only nutjob going out camping in the winter, it seems. I found a colleague, who’s enjoying it just as much, but for completely different reasons. 🙂

Personally, I just like the vibe of off-season vacation spots on the Baltic Sea a lot.. It has a weirdly eery feeling, seeing those empty hotels with the tinted windows toward the beach, maximising balcony exposure as much as possible.. But more often than not, there are also a couple of camping grounds around and we decided to spend the weekend there. My colleague testing out new gear, me enjoying the scenery without all the hubbub during the vacation season.

Well, what do you know? It took a couple of years after being run over by a car(while walking home from the bus stop) to feel well enough to cycle again and on this very day, I went to Glückstadt, a pretty little town a little up the Elbe river from Hamburg. But not only is Glückstadt worth having a look, the route out there can be quite nice, too(contrary to the image shown 😃).

Since last year’s vacations worked out so well, I decided to make use of my car and do another road trip. I’ve been to France a couple of times, but those have been overshadowed by a particularly bad New Year’s in Paris about a decade ago.

I wasn’t feeling to great back then and the stereotypical Paris experience didn’t help either(although it got better after I got back into speaking a little French for the last two days).. But since then, I’ve had a couple of invitations to IBM in Montpellier and down in the south, people are a little more relaxed and I really liked my stays there, so I decided to give it another go and I had a great couple of days driving around the Grand Est and the Hauts-de-France. I mostly stayed in the cheapest of cheap F1 motels, because they are reasonably priced, reasonably clean(most of the time) and provide ample parking right behind the motel.

Long story short: I really enjoyed getting out of my daily routine for a bit, watching the landscape zoom by and stretching my legs walking a few smaller cities and catching regional sights.

Somehow, I imagined car ownership a little different. Instead of hauling one of my folding kayaks out to the water, I catch myself going to places, just to get out of the apartment for a bit, get some driving practice and maybe get a couple of snapshots.

Today, it’s just a quick one. On my way home from work, I stopped at Hamburg’s Stadthausbrücke to make one of those long(-ish) exposure shots, I’m currently doing a lot of. 🙂

Like I said at the beginning of my US road trip, work was a bit tiresome, so I decided to have two vacations this year(and flights were available for cheap).

I spent the summer driving around the US east and in November, I went to Tokyo for a week(that’s probably the reason for the cheap flight tickets).

After riding a car for two weeks, piecing together the journey as I went, I decided to just stay in Tokyo, since I was only there for a week, had to get accustomed to the language again and most important: See what food options are available, since I’m allergic to fish and seafood. 🤪

So this was more of an exploration into what’s possible for me in Japan, because a lot of meals include Dashi, stock made from fish flakes.. For many Japanese people, it’s not even considered to be “fish”, but more of a flavouring agent and it’s not always included in the list of ingredients.

Either by selecting the right food or just by accident, I didn’t have any problems, even if I did have a bit of stock made with a bit of fish in a lot of water, so 👍.

Some people might disagree with me here, but I thought, a week or a little more was enough for a first trip to Tokyo, if you’re not super-social and don’t want to explore the night life. Or to put it in another way: After exploring a lot of the most common sights, mostly on foot instead of taking the train everywhere, I was a bit templed out and I was happy to return home. But ever since, I’ve been planning my return to explore some of the beautiful Japanese scenery. And with the two trips of 2016 and a little clever shopping, I’ve got enough bonus miles racked up to do so soon. 🙂