Working from a rocking chair and voice interruptions: how I survived in the world of jitter and messages in a bottle!
During the first week, I worked in a small living room near my room. I used the TV as a monitor and sat on a regular chair at a regular table. I'm the kind of guy who is clearly bothered by this: an ergonomic chair is a must-have. And a second monitor wouldn't have hurt either. Using my laptop as a second screen didn't work out: there was nowhere convenient to put it. Good thing I at least had a Microsoft Designer Compact wireless keyboard to sit more comfortably.
I also suffered from the internet quality: it clearly fell short of Latvian standards. I work on a virtual machine in the cloud. It's a remote computer, you connect, it shows you a screen, and your keystrokes are sent to the cloud. This is called VDI. Unfortunately, my VDI is in the US, which heavily affects the latency of packets bouncing back and forth.
I suspect IP protocol jitter is to blame for everything. Jitter is not that hard to understand. Imagine you are throwing bottles with little notes into a river. Each note has only one sentence from your letter. A kilometer downstream, your wife catches the bottles and tries to read the letter. You throw the bottles at one-minute intervals. First, "Hi, you are my ", then "wonderful and beautiful." "We have a new neighbor,", then "such a fool and a bitch!", then "It's not a man's job", and then "to wash dishes, we need a dishwasher.", "I will", then "love you", "in a hundred trillion billion worlds".
It's clear that the bottles won't arrive exactly in order: some will overtake each other, and some will get stuck completely, and you'll have to throw them again. And if you don't want a divorce when your wife reads "Hi, you are my such a fool and a bitch. It's not a man's job to love you in a hundred trillion billion worlds", you'd better number the bottles and ask her to read everything in order. Jitter in this example is exactly the difference between the time it took for the fastest bottle to float down and the slowest one. As you understand, until the slowest one arrives, you can't really read the letter. The same thing happens with IP protocol packets and voice communication over the internet. When you hear the robotic and breaking voice of the person you are talking to, in many cases it means that a couple of packets with pieces of their voice got delayed on the way, just like the bottle with the phrase "wonderful and beautiful".
How I became a real mountain biker and won a medal of honor in the form of holes in my jacket
Despite it getting colder and colder, I still went for a ride a couple of times on workdays: during lunch. Up on the mountain, I had a shop with 10 varieties of apples, and I would usually ride there, and then roll down the mountain wherever my eyes took me. After that, the only thing left was to manage to crawl back into my house so that lunch wouldn't end up being too long.
One time my eyes took me into some bushes, and I underestimated them. How can you underestimate bushes, you might ask? Easy: I was used to normal branches, and it didn't cross my mind that I was in a country where it's very dry in the summer. The bushes turned out to be covered in incredibly hard thorns, which led to a disaster: I got scratched up myself, and I tore my new thin cycling jacket. It's a bummer, I spent a long time looking for it so it would match, and it cost a lot of money. It's still usable, but now it has little holes. The only thing left is to proudly wear them as a medal of honor of a real mountain biker who doesn't shy away from tough routes.
In the evenings I strolled around Girona, admiring the architecture. The streets are narrow, everything is so medieval and yet hilly — a feast for the eyes. It was pretty chilly, so I was very glad I had bought a puffy green down jacket. That's how I walked around, all colorful: green jacket and cap, burgundy pants and shoes, and a bright yellow sweater under the jacket. I felt a little lonely, honestly, since there wasn't really anyone to talk to, except for calling home.
The city was brightly decorated for Christmas with all sorts of garlands and baubles. There was no real feeling of the energy crisis that the Putinist zombies love to laugh about: I think normally it lights up an order of magnitude more, but I hadn't seen that, and I had nothing to compare it to. Speaking more about the energy crisis: in the house, I turned on the gas heater as much as I wanted, and the water from the shower, after a minute of waiting, came out of the gas boiler simply boiling hot. I've never encountered such temperatures back home.
I also wanted to say that Girona stands on the Onyar river, and right in the city center there are several pedestrian bridges that were completely covered in little lights. So cute!
Once again, I recommend everyone to visit. Getting there is very easy, although not exactly cheap: you fly to Barcelona (€50-200 round trip), and from there by train (€15-70 round trip). You can sleep somewhere else: a day or two is enough for you to see the city.
Girona: a city with history, a willful character, and bicycles on every corner
Girona is generally a city with a very rich history. An important fortress that was besieged 25 times and captured 7 times, until Napoleon destroyed the city almost to the ground. A center of trade, where there was always a huge Jewish community, and even its own Kabbalistic school. In Girona, there is a very large and beautiful Cathedral of Saint Mary, built in 1416.
Girona is a wealthy and willful city. For instance, electric streetlights appeared here way back in the 19th century, which is just mind-blowing. When Catalonia wanted to secede, the city very quickly announced that it was ready in the front ranks to cut ties with the Spanish government. By the way, in one of the episodes and in personal conversations, I misled you: the Valencian language is the closest relative to Catalan, not to Castilian ("Spanish").
Next come some facts that I seem to have already mentioned, but I have a bad memory, so I will repeat myself.
Rivers in Catalonia often dry up in the summer. When I arrived, only puddles were left of the Onyar river, even though its concrete-and-stone banks are ten meters high, if not more. Okay, they dry up in the summer, but I arrived in November? The thing is, the summer had been very dry, and everyone was very worried that there was still no water. Fortunately for farmers and ecologists, prolonged rains soon started, and the riverbed filled with water. Fortunately for me, these rains lasted less than a week.
The city is favored by American cycling teams; there is simply an incredible number of bike shops and workshops here. Even if you drive a dozen or two kilometers away to a village of five hundred people, there might be a bike rental and a shop. Amazing.
I also remembered that one time I was walking in the evening and talking to a friend on the phone. I thought I kind of knew where to go, but it turned out that in a hilly area everything is deceptive: I went up the mountain in the wrong direction, and then stomped home for another half hour. So I ended up walking ten kilometers again. It wouldn't be a big deal, but by the time you take a shower, it's already midnight, and I already have a problem with sleep. Or rather, right now the problem is putting the book down, or even the phone (rock bottom entirely).
You'd think: what could I possibly read there. But I just crave dopamine. I need to do a dopamine retreat and practice techno-asceticism, but it's hard to force myself. Nevertheless, giving up is not an option.
Write your email here: