Personal

Besides research, I'm still highly interested in computers and software but it definitely comes second to all sorts of physical activities. I play table tennis competitively for more than 15 years, go bouldering for more than 10 years and started to enrich my sports portfolio with some beach volleyball for the past 2 years. If there is still some time and energy to spare, I go cycling, running, play badminton or try some new physical activities (besides those with focus on physical contact). I'm quite far from the professional level in any of these sports, but am happy to quickly achieve a level where the pool of adequate training partners gets rather small. Overall, it is pretty rare for me to have a real recovery day. After all, that's what multiple sports are for: You can perfectly recover from an exhausting day of training by doing a distinct sport. Besides, I also like physical e-sports are quite cool, and I've gotten pretty decent in Beat Saber over the years. Though I cannot really recommend investing time to get to the highest level of the game (yes, there is ranked) as it looses its original spirit for sure. On the positive side, it's still nice to be able to do many Expert+ levels quite casually and having more capacity for your dance moves.

I'm a general fan of investing too much time to increase the efficiency of repetitive things (which is often not worth it). Factorio has been a reliable time sink for that in the past, with a megabase of 1k Science per minute probably being the pinnacle. Automation also leads to a lot of CI/CD pipelines and random bash scripts spread across my home directory. Suprisingly, this page does not yet have a pipeline but (at the time of writing) is not yet deployed either and probably after three consecutive edits I will get annoyed. I'll update this accordingly.

Over the past decade, I've also started to increasingly like electronic music. Clearly, House has been my favorite genre over the years, but I'm still quite puzzled that today's House doesn't have that much in common with the House from around 2000. Recently, I've also started to like Trance and Techno (though I need some melodic elements) and, occasionally, even find something in some Dubstep-like songs. I was quite suprised to learn that these may sound like complete garbage when listening for the first time, but when hearing the same song more often (over a longer time span) they have something special and intriguing. Sometimes I even visit clubs or festivals and, to the suprise of many others, I'm able to enjoy them without any alcohol. However, to all those DJs that mix with a single hand as the other is seemingly glued to the microphone: Why?