I took a few months break this year to work on some fun silly projects and enjoy a bit of non-work life. It also gave me a chance to try a couple of new sports, some of which have stuck and I feel like the Kidsan of 5 years ago wouldn't recognise the Kidsan of today.

One of the things I spent an awful amount of time contemplating was the state of "Big Tech" this year. Every service we use is updating their ToS to as subtly as possible give themselves the OK to use your data in AI contexts (or worse, sell it to their partner so that they can feed it to their AI). I'm also just generally sick of monopolised fields and have been making an effort to diversify my choice of tooling, be it development, communication, or fun. I have been self-hosting stuff for a long time, but this line of thinking made me want to step it up a bit.

I recently realised I was overdue some new glasses. My old ones were OK, but fairly scratched and I also never really liked them when I first bought them. It has also been some time since I wore contact lenses, and recently I have been making an effort to do "SPORT" (you know, that thing people do when they aren't doing computer stuff?).

Getting my glasses was easy enough. Appointment in Fielmann, pick some glasses (I had help choosing this time, and I am really happy with what we chose), picked them up, went back a few days later to get them adjusted, no problems. But when I asked them about making an appointment about contact lenses, they stopped being very helpful and asked me to try make an appointment online. The website either showed no appointments in my city, or appointments multiple weeks / months from now. Supposedly cancellations show up and you can get one quicker, but what am I going to do, check that multiple times a day? I needed to get an appointment quickly though, the sports were waiting.