For many years I neglected my website. Again.

Time was scarce and life was very fast-paced. But recent global events give me unexpected time. And so I give this website a fresh re-start with some thoughts. Again.

Since the site is probably primarily a mirror for my self, it feels good to update this every here and then. So I not just neglected this website, but many things in life. Updating this side helps me to become aware of many things and all the changes. Yes, again.

But this time it is different. So many things have changed over the past few years. This time it is not a new job or another city. But some rather personal archivents changed me quite a lot. I have now a family, but I also lost loved ones. After a long, really painfully long time ... I finished my PhD. Finaly. It was a big milestone for me.

But now I look back and sum up my investment on time and energy. A lot of people sufferd from my tight time schedule. Now I am back and so I hope, that there are still friends around. Was it worth it? Did I change the couse of history with my "briliant" research? Maybe not ... Probably not. But I learnd a lot. Mostly about failures. I had some interesting results in my PhD thesis but it was not a straight and easy way. And this might be the most important lessons in research. But however valuable this lesson about failures might be, it is a hard one if you have to take it in real life.

Thanks to the current situation, there is a lot time to be at home reflect. As you might guess after my first words, I reflected about my research and past decisions - but also about this strange times and its effect on all of us. I started to read books on freedom, justice, morality, economy and society.

My perspecives changed a lot and I think there might be a new research topic or at least area of interest for me. But this might be a topic for a future post.

Let me finish this more personal review with an advice ... to myself. I am years away from beeing old and even more from beeing wise. But I wish that I new a little more how to play this game some years ago. I lost so much energy in trying certain things instead of doing others.

One would think that with age comes a certain constancy in your mindset. But I don't think so. At least, it seems not be the case for me. In fact, I think it is vital to question yourself. Don't be to confortable with your thinking.

And now I imagine, how I read this text in maybe 10 years and begin to laugh about this naive chatting. Again.

Most visitors probably want to find out about me on the site because they read my name on a paper or met me at a conference. So this text might be a little of topic for you.

Or old friends probably want to know how I am doing and search online for me. Just write me or give me a call.

New website

This time I don't use a cms for my content. Instead I build the pages with HUGO. HUGO is a page builder. Instead of installing a complex content management system on a server, HUGO builds simple HTML-Files from mark-down texts. Just a little bit of configuration is needed. And with a little git magic, everything runsm builds and deoploys easy. This allows me to just host this simple HTML - which means less maintenance and a sustainable home for my website. No SQL (database or whatsoever) is needed. Who realy uses coment systems on such private sites anyway?

I can write my texts as markdown, which makes it also quite simple to upload some notes.

As the old side was gone a few years ago, I tried to recover at least some of its content. Some media ist still (songs and pictures) but I I will fix it and then everythin shuld work just fine in this new site. Again.