Iuliana Cosmina

… here it goes: I am speaking at an online Spring conference. I always feel uneasy talking about important things for me. I feel like if I give them too much importance, others won’t. Or if I am too enchanted by them, something wrong will happen and they will be taken away. A psychologist would probably have a field day trying to discover the root cause of the way I feel.

When I first received the email from Steve Anglin asking me if I want to write for Apress, I thought it was an internet scam and I was waiting for him to ask me for money. After six months of email exchanges and when the contract appeared I finally let myself believe it was happening so I started writing.

It was quite similar with the Spring I/O Virtual conference. I created the presentation, did a demo with my colleagues and friends, but I was still doubtful about it. I was almost expecting an email telling me that some other important speaker was given my spot. Also, I have never spoken at an event as important as this. It is overwhelming and paralysing. And I will have to speak in English and it is not my first language and when I panic I tend to babble. But fuck it, it was about time for me to do something like this. If it goes well, kudos to me. If it doesn’t I will just go back to my hermit’s cave. However it goes, if you want to see my presentation and hear me make make an ass of myself, register now. So far, there are 2500+ people registered. I am very curious if Youtube will bare it. :D

Stay safe, stay happy and stay inside!

I’ve never been a fan of routine. Not sure why, maybe it’s the fear rooted in me when I was a student, when me and my friends were drinking beer sitting on our asses on dirty concrete hallways dreaming of travelling and being free from society rules.

That is why I’ve looked for flexible jobs. The benefit of me juggling the working interval and the location where I work from are worth more to me than money. Maybe that is why I cannot get fit, because I cannot for the life of me follow a routine of good alimentation and exercises regimen. I am the kind of person that has pancakes for dinner and that runs a 7 in the morning and then at 7 in the evening. I do things when I feel like doing them. And feeling cannot be disciplined.

But lockdown has enforced a routine on me which I do not feel combative about. I wake up between 7 and 10 every day, without an alarm. I’m not sure exactly which parameters influence how much I sleep. But sometimes I’m all fine with 5 hours, sometimes 9 hours are not enough.

I make my coffee and work until 1 pm, when I have lunch. Then I work some more until 5 pm, sometimes 6 pm, sometimes 7pm. It depends on when I actually start working really. After work I go for a run. I usually run between 2 and 4 miles, depending again on how I feel. After that I need a shower. The shower makes me hungry usually, so sometimes I have dinner. Sometimes I just grab a beer and play StarCraft with my friends. Or play the piano.

When I don’t play StarCraft, nor play the piano, I write blog entries as this one, or work on some personal projects. And sometimes, like after I post this, I work on a presentation for some Zoom coding event. Or have a video conference with friends or mentees. Because I’ve registered as a mentor to some programming group and now I have to put in the foot work.

When I get in my bed, I open a book and read from it until I fall asleep.

Weekends are a little bit special. After I drink my coffee, if it’s cloudy outside I do some cleaning. If it’s sunny I do some gardening. After that, if it is sunny outside I go for a bike ride around the city. Otherwise, I’ll just play the piano or play some Starcraft campaigns, because my team mates are more experienced than me and I feel like a noob when I play with them. I want to be useful at some point. Also, if I don’t end up cycling, I still go for a run.

Honestly I think this lockdown has actually made me embrace a certain routine. Never in my life I’ve had such a long period where I exercised almost daily. Well… there was a period in my life after a breakup where I exercised every day for three months. But that doesn’t really count, that was me overdoing it, so I would feel pain in my other muscles except my heart.

If this lockdown ends up being the norm until September, I won’t be sorry. Because this routine of eating healthy and exercising will do me a loot of good. And if I keep doing it for so long, it may end up as a personal lifestyle.

Except the daily activities that I’ve listed previously and that are all quite mundane, mentally I seem to be fine. The eyebrows are growing back, work is a little slow, the cat is a little too demanding and last week I had that weird dystopia dream which involved John Mayer and now I can’t stop listening to his music. And a little bit of sadness has crept in because there is no way to properly estimate when I will hear this man singing live again.

I do feel a little frustrated that I was unable to go to Romania this year. Although my parents were not the best, I somehow managed to see them once per year since I’ve left home. It’s like a yearlycheckup: “You’re still alive? Good. I’m still alive as well and I’ve published a new book. See you next year!”

I realized today that there is one thing that I won’t be able to do until lockdown is over: I won’t be able to go to the sauna. And I love going to the sauna.

Also, I miss the Five Guys fries like crazy. A complete meal at  the Five Guys that included: normal portion of cajun fries, a cheeseburger with mushrooms and pickles and a salted caramel milkshake was my monthly dirty pleasure.

And I miss the macaroni and cheese from The Scottish Engineer, the pub close to my house. The irony is that before the lockdown, for a week I have considered daily going for a pint and macaroni and cheese, but postponed because I had food and beer at home. Now I really wish I should have went ahead and gorge myself. This simple story is perfect for a motivational talk: you lose all the chances you do not take. Every day for a week I drove home and the idea popped in, and I just postponed it. And now, who knows when that pub will open again or if it will open.

Anyway, this is my 52th lockdown day. I am really blessed to have the cat and the garden. It feels like I have some company and I still have the ability to go out whenever I want to.

Stay safe, stay happy and stay inside!

If you’ve read this entry here, you know that now my robot vacuum cleaner is named Brute.

And I could probably get a job as medium because about one month ago I got to look at it disappointed and say “Et tu, Brute?”.

What happened to Brute? Brute was alive and well, meaning – it would charge just fine. But it refused to communicate with the iPad and to do its job. So yeah, out of the blue, it decided to disconnect from WiFi and refuse manual commands too. So, I had to call the Neato support again and half an hour later I was packing it and sending it to Glasgow.

One month, yesterday it was back. I unpacked it and tried to convince it to talk to my iPad again. No chance. Tried to install its app on the phone, nothing. Being desperate with all the dust and cat hair in my house, I started it manually and went out for a run. 40 minutes later I receive a notification on my phone from Brute, telling me that it finished cleaning and there is a map in the application for me if I’m interested.

I was puzzled, because the damn thing did not want to connect when I left my house, and now is sending me messages? So I hurry home, and try again to connect the bastard to the iPad and this time it works.

So now, Brute is back, my house is clean and I did not have to choose a name for my next robot. Because, I already had a name in mind. Since nobody betrayed Brute, I would have named it as a person that betrayed me, my ex from a long, long time ago. :D

That would have perplexed some of my friends that did not know the full story. :)

These days I’m pretty busy working on a personal project, so there won’t be any blog entries for about two weeks. Unless I get really panic and avoid the work by writing on my blog.

Also, if you get a Neato Vacuum Robot, avoid the D7 model, get any of the other ones. This one is really sensitive and breaks down for no reason.

Stay safe, stay happy and stay inside!

I’ve found myself talking to friends and sometimes me, sometimes them, we make references to “the time after this passes, when all comes back to normal”.

And it hit me today while cooking… I do not want things to go back to normal. I want us to learn from this and move forward to a better version of how things used to be. I want the new normal to be better than the one before all this happened.

I want people to ask for politicians that were not able to handle this crisis to renounce the politician job and never be allowed to do it again. An idiot like Trump that tried to get rich from people dying should be fucking sent to jail after this crisis. I don’t care he’s 75, he can die in prison for all I care.
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