My things

By the time Saturday was finally winding down, it was already well past 22:00. The New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I had unexpectedly found in a Moldovan supermarket earlier that evening was now open beside me. I had a computer in front of me, a nice bottle of wine within reach and, more importantly, the entire Internet available for entertainment. There are probably more sensible ways to spend a Saturday night. I opened my family-tree database. That was the end of any realistic prospect of going to bed at a reasonable hour. The doctor with three wives One of the important unresolved points in the German side of my family tree concerns my great-grandfather — the father of my German grandfather. He was a medical doctor and, over the course of his life, had three wives. That much I knew. What happened around those marriages, however, had become obscured by the usual family fog that accumulates when information is passed verbally from one generation to ...

On Saturday evening, after what had already been a very long day dealing with the renovation of our house in central Chișinău, we made one final stop at a local supermarket. The objective was extremely simple: buy some wine, go back to Vita's parents' house and finally stop doing things for the day. Moldovan supermarkets are certainly not short of wine. Quite the opposite. The shelves can be packed with bottles from local producers, covering everything from very inexpensive everyday wines to considerably more ambitious bottles. So I was walking past what was, by now, a fairly familiar wall of wine when something caught my attention. New Zealand. I stopped and looked again. There, among all those bottles in a supermarket in Moldova, was a 2025 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, branded Blue Horizon . I had not been looking for New Zealand wine. In fact, I had absolutely no expectation of finding any. That was precisely why seeing it...

Saturday, 26 September, was supposed to be one of those thoroughly mundane days: deal with a few things at the house, collect some photographs, sort out the Internet connection and eventually go home. Of course, once a house renovation is involved, a list containing the words “a few things” should never be trusted. We are still spending much of our time at Vita’s parents’ house while the work on our own place in central Chișinău continues. So the day began there with a suitably substantial breakfast before we set off for the city, about a thirty-minute drive away. We had several jobs waiting for us. By the time we finally returned in the evening, the day had somehow accumulated a police stop, another meeting with the contractor, roughly a thousand old family photographs, one failed fibre installation, another Internet contract, Georgian lemonade, two enormous pieces of Napoleon cake and some salt-and-pepper dispensers that very nearly acquired new owners. ...

After looking in detail at the Guest model, the next logical object in my C++ event-planning reconstruction is the Group . At first, a Group appears simpler than a Guest. And in terms of stored state, it genuinely is. The reconstructed Group contains only three pieces of group-specific state: a collection of Guests, a Group name and a separate object containing shared contact information. But the simplicity of those fields is deceptive. The Group sits at an important junction in the application. It connects individual Guests into meaningful units, provides shared contact information, contributes presentation and sorting behaviour, and even participates in seating-related calculations. The Group is not merely a label attached to several Guests. It is an independent domain object with its own identity, contact data, membership and behaviour. The Group is itself an Event Object Like the Guest, the Group derives from the common Event Object foundatio...

Log Episode 1 [Thu, Jul 23, 2026] - 2026-Aug-18 Episode 2 [Thu, Jul 30, 2026] - 2026-Aug-18 Episode 3 [Thu, Aug 6, 2026] - 2026-Aug-18 Episode 4 [Thu, Aug 13, 2026] - 2026-Aug-22 Episode 5 [Thu, Aug 20, 2026] - 2026-Sep-02 Episode 6 [Thu, Aug 27, 2026] - 2026-Sep-02 Episode 7 [Thu, Sep 3, 2026] - 2026-Sep-03 Episode 8 [Thu, Sep 10, 2026] - 2020-Sep-11 Episode 9 [Thu, Sep 17, 2026] - 2026-Sep-24 Episode 10 [Thu, Sep 24, 2026] - 2026-Sep-24

For some time I have had a box here that was sent to me by “ P ” from New Zealand. It arrived while the family-tree project was already expanding in several directions, and there always seemed to be something more immediate demanding attention: another archive to search, another document to process, another email to answer, another branch of the family suddenly producing new information. Today I finally had enough time to sit down, open the box properly and begin looking through what was inside. I was expecting family material, of course, but I was not quite prepared for what I found. Among the contents is a set of old handwritten sheets containing names, relationships and dates from the family tree. As I carefully worked my way through what I could decipher, the chronology kept moving backwards: through the nineteenth century, then the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, until eventually I found information apparently reaching all the way back to 1546 . That is an extraordin...

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 25 March 2026 Administrative control in my home-lab platform is intentionally centralised and conservative. Every managed host receives operating-system updates exclusively from a local software repository hosted on HG000009, the platform’s front-end data-store node. The hosts do not retrieve updates directly from external package sources. Instead, new packages enter the environment through one deliberately controlled path. The objective is not to prevent change. It is to ensure that change enters the platform intentionally, visibly and under conditions I understand. The update path The model is deliberately simple: External package sources | | Manual repository update | Review and deliberate release v +--------------------------------+ | HG000009 local repository | | Approved package versions | +--------------------------------+ | | Internal distribution only ...