dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#life Articles



COVID-19: day 3 of working from home

We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion …

Battling tiredness with drugs

It might be the time of the year, with its short days and long, dark nights, it might be kids causing us to pull our hair out, taking their emotional toll and sipping energy, and work is also a big energy sink (thankfully mostly a gratifying one), but I have …
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Christmas 2019

While I'm taking some down time from work - which is rather a bunch on my mind lately, which is both a good and less good thing - I will be spending a lot of time with my loved ones. My intention is to almost not touch computers in the upcoming few …
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Sweet Sixteen

Today this little web corner has existed for sixteen years. Funny thing is that 'sixteen years' does not even sound that long anymore in my ears, while it is enough for a newborn to grow into a person nearing maturity. While I would not say this weblog is really mature …
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Head full of work

Do you know that cozy feeling of having thoughts of your work almost never leave your head? Waking up in the night and having your mind stray to unfinished tasks? Yeah? It sucks. (I need a vacation, and some more milestones behind me).

Emerging from work

It's over half a year ago that I switched jobs, coming from a big media company and now leading a new, young team at basically a startup. It switched me on again, giving me an energy for work stuff I had not felt for a while somehow, and made me …

'Social gardens', or 'More reasons to dammIT'

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

I remember writing

I remember writing (yes, writing) short weblog updates in the train on my Sony Clie running PalmOS, using the fast glyphs of Graffiti, in 2004. I want to go back to that, realising that my weblog had turned into a collection of longer articles as of late, spaced quite far …

Limited braincycles

Do you know that feeling that halfway through the day you start to be less 'fresh'? Myself, I have the experience of getting a bit slower over the course of the day: in the morning, I can fix the problem I was struggling with the last afternoon in a few …
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The end of 2017

The end is near. Well, at least the end of 2017, as this roller-coaster of a year is counting its last days. In less than two days, it will be Christmas, and these days mean a general slowing down of life and making time to enjoy each other for us …
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Hello 2017

The year 2017 has barely begun, but somehow it is already looking up. At least in my personal bubble. Son is suddenly confident enough to try a lot of new words, with mixed success in pronunciation or even correctness, but he is leaping forward amazingly. I am really happy with …
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Goodbye 2016

2016 was... interesting. Globally, it was overshadowed by some almost-disastrous events, and a lot of great and/or famous people left us (I won't even speak about the political... issues the world is having). Personally, the year was challenging. Having a second kid eliminates all chances of getting some decent …

Nienke says "Hello World"

In the night of Sunday to Monday, at 4:17, Nienke rushed into this world. Where Daan took his time being delivered, I was barely awake (Ineke woke me at 4:01) when Nienke saw her first lamplight. Needless to say, she was born at home, in the tub where …
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dammIT: 12 years of rants

Today it's 12 years ago I officially started this weblog and I finally have taken some steps to get the next generation of the codebase working on my server. It's getting there, looking forward to continue dammIT in its Django incarnation :) This year has been fascinating; junior went from barely …

Short story time

The ants didn't know what they had coming. I almost pitied the little critters. Almost. Finishing my whisky I went to bed, chuckling softly.

Meeting budgets: an idea to keep meetings useful

You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …

Eleven years and counting

Yesterday this weblog turned eleven. I haven't always been that faithful to it, having times I didn't post for months (my inspiration apparently comes in waves). However, even though I've been using social media like Twitter for ages (five and a half year it seems), I keep on posting here …