Recently in November '24

The eleventh month of the year is now gone, and it’s almost time for Sinterklaas and then Christmas. November had more events than I was actually planning for, but it all ended up going well. Let’s recap!

🍄 Life

At the beginning of November, similarly to what happens other years, there was the GLOW light festival here in Eindhoven. We walked the route with some friends and I must say: I am disappointed. I feel like year after year it becomes more and more disappointing. Some rumours say that they’re saving money for a big show next year… but I wouldn’t count on it.

I also attended a meetup in Amsterdam, AdvancedJS. A friend of mine gave a talk there about the experimental AI API on Chrome, and there was another talk about advanced generics in TypeScript. I wish I would attend more meetups, but I feel like Eindhoven doesn’t have nearly as many, and the ones that are in other cities are usually planned to be right after work hours. And that is very hard for me, since I can’t teleport to Amsterdam (or any other city for that matter).

Talking about work, and time, we managed to negotiate work from home days, finally. This is something I actually missed after moving from a completely remote company to a more “regular” company, let’s say. With this, we also managed to negotiate the working hours to be slightly more flexible.

I also visited Den Haag, for a visit at the embassy to collect my new ID card, which now adheres to the EU guidelines. Finally. Portugal was a few years late to the implementation, being the last country to do it with Bulgaria. Also got the chance of getting some very nice coffee beans at Inproc. They also very nice teas.

Last week, we went to Rotterdam and visited the exhibition at the Kunsthal: DIVA. A very nice exhibition encompassing the lives and the feats of many diva’s and the role of feminine voices in the arts. This exhibition has a sort of “spacial interaction”, where music changes according to where you are and what you’re looking at, matching the music from the artist in question.

Lastly, visited Maastricht and the caves there. I had no idea Maastricht had caves, despite not being natural ones. We also visited the Christmas market in Maastricht, which had a lot of German booths and a lot of German Christmas market food. That was quite nice. It was not as great as the ones in Germany, but it was still very enjoyable.

💪 Health

Repeating what I said last month: not many updates. Still going to the gym, and doing a few new exercises that finally involve my wrists. I think they are improving, albeit slower than I expected. There’s still some way to go. It’s quite annoying.

📚 Reading

So… I finished reading the second book of the Silo trilogy: Shift. How amazing was it? Very! In this book, we get more background about why people are living in silos, how the silos were created, for which purpose, and why. It also shows and explains what happened to some other silos, giving a lot of background information for things that are mentioned in the first book. I highly recommend it. I’m now reading the third and last book.

🍿 Entertainment

We attended two concerts this month, both from Dutch artists: MEROL and Eefje de Visser. It was very nice. We also had a third one planned, but unfortunately we both got sick with some flu-like thing, and I also had a stomach flu. Definitely won’t recommend.

When it comes to 🎬 movies, I only watched two this month. The first one was Juror #2. This movies depicts an American that has been summoned for jury duty for a crime that he may, or may not, have committed. It was very interesting to see, especially to learn more about what the jury duty encompasses. The second movie was Here and it was filmed in a very interesting way: the camera was fixed thorough the whole movie, while we saw the lives of many people in a specific area of the world.

This month in the series 📺 series department, we have: The Bear, The Empress and Abbott Elementary. The Bear felt very stressful at the beginning, but it ended up being great, with a lot of character development from all characters. Then, I watched the second season of The Empress, which follows the life of Empress Elizabeth “Sissi” of Austria. And in between we watched a few episodes of Abbott Elementary.

Until next time!