General

Life, the universe, and everything.

17 June 2025

The Baltics and a new way to travel (for me)

Last week I visited the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I’ve been interested in visiting them for a while since they have such a fascinating history, and they are three countries that are as similar as they are different. Lithuania in particular was interesting to me because the language, Lithuanian, is one of the oldest and most archaic of all the Indo-European languages. For this journey, for the first time in my life I actually booked an organized group travel via Intrepid. There are plenty of similar companies that offer such tours, such as for example GAdventures and WeRoad. […]

31 December 2024

2024 and the Half-Life of a Millennial

I used to diligentially chronicle my achievements of the year in my blog, back when it was actually a somewhat active blog. With everything being quantifiable I could sure data science the shit out of my life with fancy charts of how many books I read, how many TV shows I watched, how many games I played, how many kilometers I went running, etc. While I love stats, I guess I’m getting too old for this shit and I’d rather read books in my hobbit hole than give myself more work. It was a challenging year for me. Shit blew […]

4 September 2024

A Lifetime

I was a small, clumsy human being and I still needed to find out how to navigate the world. You carried me for the first few years of my life, always with a smile on your face. But one day (or was it the evening, I think the lights were on?), when we you were standing at the kitchen window, I asked you to pick me up and carry me, and you told me that I’m getting too heavy for you to carry me. Perhaps I was looking for different way to be carried, because some time after that, I […]

4 June 2024

Eight years of pen pals

About eight years ago, I revived a very old hobby of mine: writing letters. I used to have a few pen pals when I was a kid in the nineties. Back then, my pen pals were in particular another kid who used to come to my parents’ farm back when we had a vacation apartment business. But with the rise of the internet in the 00s, that hobby fell out of fashion and I lost touch with all of my pen pals. I made new friends on the internet and my primary form of long-distance communication became ICQ and the […]

16 January 2024

Fear of the personal

This sounds silly from someone having a personal blog, but I’m sometimes having a hard time writing personal things on my blog. How ironic, right? I think this fear stems from having written a mountain of incredibly cringey personal things in the first incarnations of my blog, having made very complicated social experiences in the past, and to some degree, from where I’m from. I used to write literally just what I was thinking in my blog between 2005 and 2008 (and also before that, but on a web 1.0 website rather than a blog). This was a completely disorganized […]

sankey diagram of job search
9 July 2023

The search is over: The journey to my new job

I’m happy to report that my job search is finally over! As of July 2023, I am employed again! I’m now working as a developer in the field of conversational AI for Germany’s biggest railway company, Deutsche Bahn. This job is a really great fit for me because it combines so many of my skills and experiences – my far-away past as a web developer and media designer with my more recent past doing a PhD in linguistics. I’m also quite happy to be working for Deutsche Bahn, not only because they play a vital role in Germany’s transformation to […]

29 March 2023

Disconnected

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

2 March 2023

Back to Work

Today is my second day of re-entering the workforce, and it’s been challenging for me – mentally and physically. Yesterday I started to work in an agency for UX, branding and conversation design, and will continue to do so full time for the next three months. My focus will be on conversation design, chatbot user experience, and related topics. I believe that this will be an interesting and educational time for me, and is a good fit for my experience in linguistics and research, as well as for my background in design. However, on a mental and personal level, going […]