It’s performance review season and my annual reminder that your job is to make it easy for your manager to let their peers know how awesome you are. Ideally you’ve kept notes over the course of the year. If not, now’s the time to document the concrete things you’ve done.

Focus on ways that you’ve measurably improved

• the value users get from your product
• the way the business makes money
• the productivity of the organization

Don’t forget company specific expectations and ways you have helped others grow.

A company-specific expectation I miss from Microsoft is “how have you leveraged the work of others?” This is such a brilliant cultural hack to fight NIH and promotion driven development.

Former Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo on performance reviews

Why aren't more practical frameworks taught in school?

I took cooking class & made recipes, but never learned salt, acid, fat, heat

I took PE & exercised, but never learned how to structure a workout

I took sooo many English classes, but never learned the keys to storytelling

Twitter user Steph Smith thinking about learning frameworks

Serves 3-4, as a lunch or light dinner.

Ingredients

• 1 Pumpkin, roughly 1.2 kg
• 300 g Potatoes
• 1 Onion
• 2 tbsp Oil
• 1/2 l Vegetable Broth
• 100 ml Cream
• Salt, Pepper, Cumin
• 1 Bundle of Chives
• (Toasted Bread Cubes)

Steps

• Peel and dice pumpkin and potatoes
• Peel onion, cut, braise lightly in hot oil
• Add pumpkin and potatoes
• Add broth and cook for 20 minutes
• Purée the soup
• Add cream, bring to a boil again
• Add salt, pepper, cumin to taste
• Cut chives into rolls, use to decorate together with bread cubes

Had to fix my bike and the sink in the bathroom today.

I used to just walk into a store and explain what I need in vague terms and wild pantomime to a guy until he went "Ah, yeah what you need is called Röhrensiphon, here's ten different models", proceeded to reveal their pros and cons and gave DIY mounting advice.

As opposed to that, trying to type "thing which connects sink to wall" into a hardware store's online search mask is a significant challenge for me. Hence my motivation to write down the correct technical terms. Since I also keep forgetting the measurements, here goes.

Bike tire measurements for my mountain bike: 26x1.75, i.e. 26" diameter by 1.75" width, which translates into ETRO 47x559, meaning 47mm width by 559mm diameter.
(Imperial and metric standard phrases switch up whether diameter or width come first. Ugh. At least it's all written on the tire itself.)

Don't forget to mount in the correct direction, it'll say ROTATION or DRIVE with an arrow symbol. Also don't lose track of any shims (ring washers) that might drop onto the floor during disassembly.

Sink drainage (Röhrensiphon): The important measurements are diameter in inch for the plunger connector(?) which plugs into the sink itself, and diameter in cm for the end which plugs into the wall (needs a different kind of large seal called Muffendichtung). 1.25" and 1.5" seem the only common measurements sold, but they're written as 1 1/2" and 1 1/4" respectively. Outlet diameter for bathroom sinks is either 30cm or 32cm, with 32cm the most common.

For the bathroom sink, I need 1 1/4" by 32cm. While you're at it, also swap out the gaskets (rubber seals) for new ones since rubber tends to get porous.

See also Nate Steiner's neat post on house maintenance - he's an XXIIVV webring participant as well.

I stumbled upon George Gritsouk's Human Git Aliases article a while back. Another one of his posts is called Master What You Hate:

I used to hate ironing clothes and merge conflicts, until I got pretty good at ironing clothes and merge conflicts. Some chores are just unfortunate realities of life, or I’m just too proud to outsource them. I can’t bring myself to pay someone to do my cleaning for me, so my near future has a lot of laundry and vacuuming coming up. The best way I found to stop dreading these things is to get as good at them as possible.

One of two things will happen. Either you get good enough at the task to make it fun, or you’ll get fast enough to not notice the pain.

So do your homework. Look it up on YouTube, RTFM, ask a friend, read a book. Buy the right tools for the job. Practice, practice, practice! Be happier and more productive. You always have the option of avoiding the task like the plague down the line.

As happenstance permits, I had a laundry-related "Eureka"-moment recently as well. I hate doing laundry. But once I stopped bitching about it and got a second drying rack, it's gotten much less inconvenient. Instead of fumbling to fit clothes onto my first tightly packed rack, I just drape the other half of them over the second one.

And lest you think I was foolish enough to think this was only about laundry and git, I've also practiced writing law analysis ad nauseam so that it doesn't bother me nearly as much any more.

Note: Since George's site is temporarily down, I've mirrored the content or linked to archival services.

Continuing my weirdly energetic current phase, I've gone ahead and painted about 50sqm of apartment walls (with a lot of skilled help). For the first time in my life, my table cloths are ironed. Come to think of it, I hadn't even owned proper table cloths so far. And I'm working through odd law cases of my own volition.

Felix, what in the world has gotten into you?

Ingredients

• 125g (soft) Butter
• 100g Sugar
• 1 pack of Vanilla Sugar
• 3 Eggs
• 250 Flour
• 1 pinch of Salt
• 1 teaspoon of Baking Powder
• 200ml of Milk

Steps

• Put regular sugar into a bowl and stir in vanilla sugar
• Add butter and mix it with the sugars
• Mix in eggs
• Add salt
• Stir in baking powder with flour, then mix into the dough
• Pour in milk in small increments and mix well

Then coat the waffle iron in a thin layer of butter and bake away.

Stuff I did these past weeks, in no particular order:

• Organized all loose items into drawers and baskets
• Planted some basil (results pending)
• Installed new ball-bearing rails on cabinet
• Built new shelf
• Fixed a few creaky shelves and tightened pretty much all the screws around the flat
• Cleaned out kitchen, put pans and cooking utensils on hangers
• Re-organized my work materials, desk
• Got new lamps with proper luminance (1500+ lm) & a nicely swiveling desk lamp, installed dimmers
• Cleaned out the balcony
• Cleaned out the basement
• Installed OpenWRT on my router
• Set up a repeater I had laying around
• Set up printer for network printing and scanning instead of fumbling with USB cables
• Decorated living room
• All in all, sorted out half a metric ton of clutter
• Re-purposed old wooden plates into wine rack
• Found a beautiful marble plate that had been tragically misused to elevate a shelf, cleaned it with acetone, used as pedestal for decor items
• De-iced the freezer
• Prepared my law books with tabs and markers
• Went running and lifted weights
• Learned interior design concepts
• Learned to pick locks
• Changed my mobile phone provider
• Set up more secure authentication for online services and moved off SMS 2FA
• Installed clothes rails and put more of my clothes on coat hangers
• Re-arranged bedroom
• Sorted out used seldomly used clothes and gave them away
• Baked a great many trays of cookies and sent them to family and friends
• Disassembled several cupboards and tables I was no longer using

Very cathartic.

While going through all my old stuff, I also realized I:

• Haven't danced Tango in years
• Don't do even remotely as much martial arts as I used to
• Don't care about computers much any more
• Have dumped a frightening amount of math- and engineering-related knowledge from my brain. How did I ever understand any of these things?
• Am getting very homely here as opposed to my chaotic years of moving and traveling

There I thought I was just going full Mr. Home Improvement, but ended up realizing a things few about myself.

I still miss my friends. About time this whole situation blows over.

Please enjoy "Leave the Bottle" by the excellent Forget the Whale.

This is song gave me an instant stinging pain in the heart the first time I heard it. It evoked the feeling of driving klezmer flow and made me remember quite vividly my turbulent year in Jerusalem. Good times, whirlwind of experiences and emotions, and if I think about it, an important step in forming my identity.

And some stories, man, I got some stories. Crazy times, special people. A buddy of mine - who used to rent a tiny flat just down the street from Bibi Netanyahu with his equally insane roommates- brazenly pinching a bottle of Jack from Uganda bar and the following morning once again being entrusted with the keys to the great archives of Yad Vashem. Hours spent on the roof of the Austrian Hospice, overlooking the old city. The souk. The beginnings of Protective Edge. Shelled-out houses in the Golan Heights. Camping and hitchhiking between the national parks and having endless trust in other people. Good times.

I guess nothing quite captures the highs and lows you used to experience in your youth. But one can reminisce…

The whole album "You. Me. Talk. Now." is available from FreeMusicArchive "for free" under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA). Don't forget to pay for the music you like though! There is a small "tip the artist" button on the top right corner of the FreeMusicArchive page. I've pitched in $25 and you should too.

Listeners to "Forget the Whale" also enjoyed: 17 Hippies, especially "Der Zug um 7.40 Uhr" or "Die Frau von Ungefähr". You don't have to understand a word of German to be swept up in their music.

Ingredients

• 250g Flour
• 1 knife's tip of Baking soda
• 100g Sugar
• 1 pack of Vanilla sugar
• 1 pinch of Salt
• 3 Eggs
• 150g Butter
• 100g Strawberry jam

Steps

• Pre-heat oven to 180°C (top-/bottom heat) or 160°C (circulating)
• Mix flour, baking soda in a bowl
• Add sugar, vanilla sugar, salt
• Separate eggs, set aside egg whites (not needed for this recipe), mix egg yolks into dough
• Mix in butter
• Roll out into a roll maybe 30cm in length, cut into 1cm wide slices
• Form slices into spheres, put onto baking sheet, dip grip end of wooden spoon into the cookies to create a small indentation (later to be filled with jam)
• Put baking sheet with cookies into oven, bake for 15min
• Let cookies cool off
• In the meantime, boil up jam in a pot
• When cookies are cooled off, pour jam into the middle of every cookie, let cool off for a further 15min

Tips

Be really cautious with the amount of baking soda. 1 knife's tip is more than enough.

Adapted from backen.de - Engelsaugen

Image: © Felix Elsner 2021, CC-BY 4.0