https://tbg.github.io/ Recent content on Tobias Grieger Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 17 Sep 2023 22:19:14 -0700 https://tbg.github.io/posts/kauai-diet/ Sun, 17 Sep 2023 22:19:14 -0700 https://tbg.github.io/posts/kauai-diet/ It’s fun to be young and just a bit reckless. On a foggy January morning in 2011, I woke up in my tent at Ke’e Beach on Kaua’i (one of the islands that make up Hawa’i) and would set off on the Kalalau trail straddling the rugged Na Pali coast. Along the way, I’d make acquaintance with a guy from Philadelphia who carried a towering backpack full of food, which, once he had set up camp under an overhang under the cliffs at Kalalau Beach, became much frequented by the local rodent population. https://tbg.github.io/posts/sabbatical-1/ Sun, 10 Sep 2023 15:27:01 -0700 https://tbg.github.io/posts/sabbatical-1/ I’m taking some time (a year!) off work these days. Typing this, I’m sitting on the sofa at an AirBnB in South Lake Tahoe that has been our home for the past five days, and keeping my three-year old company, who is, thankfully for the first time on this trip, running one of her signature high fevers. Morale is good, and everything went Better Than Expected (TM) so far: we managed the “hauls” of the trip, flying from Frankfurt to Reykjavik end of July, then on to Toronto, visiting Niagara Falls with friends from Ottawa, and finally flying out to Reno (with an extended layover in New York City) to prep and shlep our camping gear into what would be one of the muddiest Burning Man events ever recorded. https://tbg.github.io/posts/solow-sustainability/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 13:43:55 +0200 https://tbg.github.io/posts/solow-sustainability/ I enjoyed this talk by Robert M. Solow, given in 1991, on Sustainability and the sober perspective on the topic. I won’t try to summarize it and simply suggest you read it. Instead, here is a bit is only tangentially related but which is interesting to revisit, now that it’s been 32 years. Commercially usable volumes of oil were discovered in the North Sea some years ago. The two beneficiaries of North Sea oil were the UK and Norway. https://tbg.github.io/posts/reading-on-energy/ Sat, 21 Jan 2023 22:22:28 +0100 https://tbg.github.io/posts/reading-on-energy/ I was born a little over a year after the Chernobyl disaster and I grew up around stickers like these. Nuclear energy is not very popular in Germany. It’s just normal to say it’s obviously bad and move on. Chernobyl, Fukushima, giant piles of nuclear waste polluting our planet for tens of thousand of years, what’s not to love. For obvious reasons - the Gas and Climate sandwich crisis - I’ve been trying to answer some obvious questions for myself: is this renewable transition actually realistic or are we just lying to ourselves? https://tbg.github.io/posts/incidental-complexity/ Fri, 13 Jan 2023 08:02:40 +0100 https://tbg.github.io/posts/incidental-complexity/ I spent the entirety of last morning dealing with the fallout of incorrectly handling a piece of largely unnecessary complexity in the CockroachDB code base. I was familiar with the complexity; I was around when the complexity was introduced many years ago; I field questions (by others working on CockroachDB) about it a few times a year; I was, yesterday morning, working specifically in an area touched by the complexity and in fact had just improved its code documentation. https://tbg.github.io/posts/hello-world-again/ Fri, 06 Jan 2023 15:33:59 +0100 https://tbg.github.io/posts/hello-world-again/ Hello world, again Decided to given regular blogging a try again since I’ve enjoyed some of my friends and acquaintainces’ newsletters and keep private notes anyway. I have some ideas of what I might write about but I don’t want to scare anyone off :) You can subscribe here and you will receive a non-annoying e-mail whenever there is something new to see here. Responses to that e-mail will reach me and will put a smile on my face.