My things

This morning we woke up in our house in Chișinău. What a marvellous feeling. For months the house has primarily been a renovation project: builders, materials, furniture, problems to solve, things to buy, things to correct and an apparently endless list of details before we could really live here. This weekend, however, we finally crossed that rather important line between working on the house and actually living in the house . And this morning we slept until 08:30. That alone felt like an achievement. The luxury of sleeping until 08:30 We have been staying with Vita's parents while the work here progressed. They are very nice people and have looked after us extremely well, but their house comes with a completely different morning schedule. There is a rooster that apparently considers 05:00 the correct time to announce the beginning of civilisation, while the local dogs seem to regard most of the night as an appropriate period for extended...

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday evening, I was writing about one of the most frustrating weeks I have experienced since moving to Moldova. More than 24 hours without electricity, months of questionable explanations, and the growing conviction that we simply could not continue living at Vita's parents' house while waiting for our renovation in Chișinău to be completed. Today, Saturday, 10 October, was a completely different story. A car loaded with our belongings, some shopping, a beautiful new wooden deck, one of the best showers I have had in almost ten years, a restaurant experience I would rather forget, a Georgian ballet performance, and a lovely walk through central Chișinău. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I apparently tried to zoom in on a theatre stage with my fingers. Yes. Seriously. But let me start from the beginning. Saturday morning: Let's see if we can actually live here We got up early and began loading th...

What a week. What a week! There are weeks when everything seems to go wrong, and then there are weeks when you begin seriously questioning how certain things can possibly function the way they do. This was one of those weeks. We are still living at Vita's parents' house in Dumbrava, outside Chișinău, while the renovation of our own place in the city approaches completion. What was supposed to be a temporary arrangement has lasted considerably longer than I would have liked. Living with family is one thing. Living with family while dealing with an unreliable electricity supply, a completely opaque local arrangement for providing that electricity, and an extraordinary reluctance to question anything is something else entirely. By Friday evening, I had reached my limit. Tuesday: The electricity disappears. Again. On Tuesday, 6 October, the electricity went off around noon. Nothing particularly unusual about that, unfortunately. Since April, we h...

 

  Log Episode 1 [Thu, Jul 31, 2025] - 2026-Sep-18 Episode 2 [Thu, Jul 31, 2025] - 2026-Oct-07 Episode 3 [Thu, Jul 31, 2025] - 2026-Oct-07 Episode 4 [Thu, Aug 7, 2025] - 2026-Oct-07 Episode 5 [Thu, Aug 7, 2025] - 2026-Oct-07 Episode 6 [Thu, Aug 14, 2025] - 2026-Oct-07 Episode 7 [Thu, Aug 14, 2025] - 2026-Oct-08 Episode 8 [Thu, Aug 21, 2025] - 2026-Oct-08 Episode 9 [Thu, Aug 21, 2025] - 2026-Oct-08 Episode 10 [Thu, Aug 28, 2025] - 2026-Oct-09 Episode 11 [Thu, Aug 28, 2025] - 2026-Oct-09 Episode 12 [Thu, Aug 28, 2025] - 2026-Oct-09

The last article in this series looked at the contact information associated with a Group. That object contained a complete postal address together with several telephone numbers and an email address. The event model contains another contact object as well, but this one is deliberately smaller. It belongs to the individual Guest . The reconstructed Guest Contact model contains only four values: a work telephone number, a home telephone number, a mobile telephone number and an email address. That simplicity is useful because it exposes an architectural decision that might otherwise be easy to miss. The software does not assume that all contact information has the same scope. An individual Guest has personal communication channels, while the Group can carry the wider postal and shared-contact information that may apply to a household, company or delegation. The Guest Contact object is intentionally narrow: it represents ways of communicating directly with an...

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 30 March 2026 Over several months, I participated in an extensive selection process with a large global technology organisation. The process included seven interviews covering different dimensions of the role: initial talent screening; systems design; programming; people management; technical leadership; cultural alignment; and a final discussion with a global director. The position sat within a highly specialised and emerging area of security engineering. After approximately four months, I reached the final shortlist. I was not selected. It was not the outcome I wanted, but it did not make the process worthless. A final rejection describes the result of one competition. It does not erase the evidence produced during every stage that preceded it. Seven interviews test more than technical knowledge A long interview process is not one assessment repeated several times. Each stage examines a different question. Talent screening Can the ...