Oh, hi. It’s been a while. I have mostly forgotten about the existence of this blog, but I do regularly get GitHub notifications about vulnerable modules, so I’ve been thinking about updating the generator (Hugo) and the build process.

But anyway, a couple of years have swooshed by since my last post and a lot has happened.

Hello, folks! It’s been a while since my last post. Those who know me in real life should know that our family grew from 2 to 3 in July 2022. Getting a baby boy has changed many things in our lives, and routines now revolve around the little one.

A while ago, many of us were eager to finally witness the end of the pandemic. To have the opportunity and privilege to travel again, to see the world, explore new cities and get immersed in new cultural experiences. And not just that, but to bring security to the world economy. Get the businesses booming and value of your investment portfolios increasing. To feel the future being a little bit more secure than it has been during the past 2 years.

A decent amount of water has flown through river Thames since my last update. Actually, it doesn’t matter that much what’s flowing in Thames right now because I left the UK for good. I am now living in Sydney, Australia so that’s quite a jump to the other side of the world!

Working from home has become a hot topic again, as the light at the end of the Covid tunnel is shining brighter and brighter every day. 20 million people in the UK have already received their first vaccine dose. That’s nearly one third of the population!

Prime minister Boris Johnson recently said that workers will return to the office in a few short months. Today, a director at a large office and retail complex said that people are keen to return to the office.

Many of you have probably heard about the ongoing battle between Facebook and media corporations in Australia. A proposed law known as the News Media Bargaining Code requires large internet companies such as Facebook and Google to subsidise local news media companies for sharing links to their content. After threatening to entirely pull out from the Australian market, Google finally reached an agreement while Facebook took a completely different route. Facebook has decided to start blocking people from sharing any links to Australian media. This blocking mechanism turned out to be very flawed and it’s actually blocking not only links to news content, but also blog articles hosted on private blogs, non-profit organisations’ websites and even critical information channels such as bushfire alerts.

The past couple of weeks have been really cold. The media calls it the Beast From The Baltic, a bit like the Beast From The East, which brought proper ice and snow in London three years ago when I moved here from Berlin. There hasn’t been much snow, to be fair, but the temperature has dropped below 0ºC and even stayed there for several days. It should be getting warmer soon though. I can feel the spring is just behind the corner!

It’s been a week since I deactivated my Facebook account. So far I haven’t really missed it at all. I was expecting to get some sort of withdrawal symptoms but none have emerged so far.

I also logged out from Twitter and Instagram but I didn’t deactivate the accounts. I haven’t yet decided whether I want to keep them or not.

Taking a break from social media is progressing as I permanently deactivated my Facebook account today. I know I’m not going to miss it, although I was in a couple of useful groups.

Facebook often gets criticised for the lack of privacy. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product being sold”, and that is very much true. Facebook gets revenue from advertising. To be able to target ads, they need your data. Whatever you have in your Facebook profile, your friends, everything you have ever posted there or all the websites you ever visited that had a Facebook like button, they will all count. Even if you don’t have a Facebook profile, they will still probably keep a shadow profile of you, based on your phone number, email address or other identifiers they may get from you or people you interact with.

In November, when the US election day arrived, I noticed I was getting anxious. When the result still wasn’t clear in the morning, I decided to take a break from all social media and news. As a result, I had two incredibly productive days at work and I felt so much better. The short break was enough to cure my anxiety but it tends to creep in every now and then, when I spend too much time on social media. By social media I mean mostly Facebook and Twitter.