My main computer is a Dell XPS 15 9570. Hardware spec highlights: Intel® Core™ i9-8950HK CPU with 12 threads @ 2.90 GHz (it can cheat so much with the calculations that it can run at up to 4.80 GHz) 32 GB DDR4 2666 MHz RAM NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050Ti main graphics card with 4 GB GDDR5 Intel i915 graphics for battery saving 1 TB M.2 2280 PCIe SSD 15.

Almost a month ago I had one of those drives home from work where I was so completely lost in thought that I probably wasn’t a very safe driver. But I did get things sorted out, and a decision made: No more triathlon for now, just running. I want to give the whole trail and ultra running thing a go. I still love swimming, cycling and the whole triathlon thing, but I just can’t fit it into my life in a good way.

I have finally taken the jump, and is fully self employed with my own company, Liebach Consulting, working with 7N as my agent, currently exactly half way through my first 6 month full-time contract. It feels very good. The downside is that I don’t know anything about where I work and what I do after april 1st when the current contract ends. They may extend it—they have an option for a 3 month extension—or decide they don’t need me anymore.

I have finally pulled the trigger and bought an Android phone; my trusty old iPhone 5 was getting less trusty, and since iOS 11 will not support iPhone 5’s (for very good reasons), I figured it was time for a new phone, so about 3 weeks ago I bought a OnePlus 5, and I’m loving it. Bye bye Apple, it was good while it lasted. I find Apple hardware far less compelling now than I did about 5 years ago when I last bought hardware from them, so it was an easy choice, and yes, my laptop is also that old, and it also needs a replacement soon, finances permitting, and it’ll be a PC running Linux, OpenBSD or FreeBSD.

Today I visited my dentist to have her look at a suspicious tooth she had discovered a few weeks ago when I had to have a root canal done in a tooth that I broke. She couldn’t quite make out what was wrong on the original x-rays, so had a new one taken today, and it was still not conclusive, so she just had to anaesthetize and start drilling to see what was wrong.

Last sunday I sat at Soulhouse in Copenhagen, meditating in intense bliss, tears of happiness and gratefulness running down my face, in The New Tantra’s Step 9. Absolutely one of the top experiences of my life in itself, and a deep imprint that will no doubt reverberate through the rest of my life. It was, in other words, profound. The deceptively simple—but not easy—trick that Alex Vartman and Apollo taught was this: sit and meditate, and take the perspective that you’re dreaming.

Finally I found a job. And not just a job to have a job, but a job that is right up my alley. Right from when I first saw the job I had a good feeling about it. It was mine. So I sent off the job application, and then waited. Finally I got called in for an interview last thursday, which went really well and felt real good, and then within an hour of arriving back home I got a call and was offered the job.

I’ve had a draft of a blog post titled “Applelandia Exit Strategy” lying around for 6 months or so. It is about how I will be leaving the lands of Apple and live the super sexy and free open source lifestyle with a Linux laptop and Cyanogenmod on my Android smartphone. Alas, it is not to be, not for the foreseeable future. I have a very short list of Mac software that I have a really hard time finding an adequate replacement for on Linux; 1Password & Soulver.

I stumbled upon this talk by David Friedman about how you could construct a society with no government. You could call it anarchy, but Friedman seems to call it “radical capitalism”. He wrote a book named “The Machinery of Freedom”, and this talk is based on that. Fullscreen is recommended. There are more details about the economics of it in The Market for Law (video link doesn’t work, so go for the audio), including the weaker sides of such a system.

The title of this site may seem a bit weird, unless you know the full Zen Proverb: Before Enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water. And that might still be a bit weird… Enlightenment, in the buddhist sense, changes nothing on the outside, you still have to chop wood and carry water. This is not to say that I think I am in any way, shape or form, enlightened.

I think Octopress is a bit too complex for my needs, so when something broke—again—I took the oportunity to port everything back to good old jekyll. I think I like it. For simplicity’s sake I just use the default jekyll templates with some minimal changes, and I’ve written a Makefile and a new_post.sh script to manage stuff, and that’s it. There are no doubt some things that broke in the process, but going through all 700+ blog posts is a bit much to ask, I think.

My iPhone 5 is getting old, but I have given it a new lease on life. The battery didn’t last for a full day of normal use, and most frustratingly, it wouldn’t charge unless I jammed the connector in real hard, at just the right angle. Lately not even that was enough, sometimes it would indicate it was charging, but the battery would still be draining. It was so incredibly frustrating.

By LaTeX I don’t mean just latex, but LaTeX, the document typesetting system originally developed by Leslie Lamport. Being unemployed means I write job applications quite a bit, and I’ve used Pages.app for it, but one day, which turned in to 2 days, I took the plunge and rewrote my Curriculum Vitae in LaTeX, both a Danish and an English version, using the absolutely excellent ModernCV class by Xavier Danaux. You can peek at the TeX sources in Danish and English if you wish.

I guess the euphemistic term is “laid off”, but I am not one for euphemisms. It is quite a gut punch to get fired like that, even on an otherwise gorgeous august monday morning. My boss had requested a “meeting” (complete with the quotes around) the friday before, and I had a bad feeling about it from the start. And I was right like a Jedi. There are no hard feelings whatsoever, either way.

Today I officially started my 2013 multisport campaign by racing Jels Duathlon 2013 in 2:15:28.6. Files: First run, 5 km Bike, 44 km Second run, 5 km The format was 5-44-5 in probably the coldest and most miserable weather I’ve ever raced in. The only other duathlon I have raced, back in 1992, was warmer, but so windy lots of people had trouble staying upright on the bike. What is it with duathlon and the weather?

Since I started loosing weight early in November last year I’ve been averaging just over 0.6 kg/week, until late in January. All of February my weight has been stable around 83 kg, and nothing happened. About a week into February I lost energy, and completely failed to train several days in a row at one point. I thought I had a virus in my body or something, but it didn’t really feel like it.

Yesterday I raced Thy Trail Marathon 2013, the ½ marathon distance. I was 61st out of 157, with a time of 2:04:38. Driving to the race I remember thinking “why did I change to the half distance when the full marathon distance would have been 10 times the fun?” Well, I did because I was afraid the recovery after a marathon would cost too much ironman training, so there was a good reason.

Today, exactly 10 years ago, I published my first blog post here. Since then I found love, got married, had a son and a daughter (not blogged, sadly, since the site was un-updateable for a few months) and a divorce. All more or less chronicled here, alongside lots of random nerdery. Reading back through the archives is quite an emotional roller coaster, triggering all kinds of memories of the times when I wrote the posts.

My goal for Challenge Roth 2013 is to go sub-10 hours. I want to see the hours on my watch in the single digits when I cross the finish line. Just like Patrick Rhone I have my fear of failure, and my thought process is almost exactly like his. Setting goals and fear not reaching them is natural. But not a reason not to set goals. A good goal is a goal that’s a little scary.

So far I’ve entered the following races for 2013: 2012-12-29: Fussingø Trail, 15 km (yes, not 2013 yet, I know) 2013-02-23: Thy Trail Marathon, the half marathon distance 2013-04-07: Jels Duathlon 2013-05-09: Holstebro Triathlon, 650-30-7 2013-05-26: Haderslev Triathlon, 1900-90-21 2013-07-14: Challenge Roth, 3800-180-42 2013-08-25: Silkeborg Triathlon, relay bike, 45 km TT I will probably race Randers Open Water, if I can fit it in, but the Danish open water swim calendar is not yet online, so I don’t know yet.