About the travel. British Airways decided to gift me a free business class upgrade, and they notified me when I was dropping off my luggage, not at the last minute. That was super-nice, because they are not my primary carrier, and I didn’t expect it. Also, that meant that I could sleep horizontally and try to get my sleep back on track. But now, I had a dilemma. Originally, I booked premium and planned to skip the meal and try to sleep right away, but now, there was some fancy food in sight, and at the same time, the flight was delayed even more.
I ended up having dinner, which was a mistake, because although we departed almost an hour late, the captain made up for it and we arrived almost on time, which meant I had less than four hours of sleep. My Apple Watch was going nuts about my lack of sleep.
I had a very long connection in London, which I was hoping to use to catch up on my community-related work, but I wasn’t super productive because I was so tired. My arrival in Helsinki was very late(as expected), and we had an early flight to Vienna.
To be done with the topic of sleep deprivation, we also had a late dinner with one of me peer on the first night in Vienna, and I finally caught up on sleep on Tuesday :).
I spent a very long time choosing a hotel to stay in Vienna, and it was OK location-wise, but there were several unexpected twists. First, although they said on the website they had a fitness center, it was… not really. To be precise, it meant a corner in their pre-sauna room, so you could technically exercise after you get out of the sauna, but not like you could come in the morning and do the weights. Second (and that was the first time ever I had such a problem) – there was no closet in the room. Nothing. Even a small one. Instead, there were two hooks with a bunch of hangers, and good luck hanging both the coats and the clothes! I would never thought I had to check for that!
Anyway, we survived, and are about to leave now, but I will definitely mention it in my review 🙂
It might look like schnitzels, desserts, and coffee, and lots of entertainment, but this visit provoked a lot of thought about the parts of the history I didn’t know. I how I will have time to tell al about it, but for now – just my Instagram feed 🙂
I will show more pictures shortly, but for now, just one. I am trying to spend my birthday in a new country every year, at least for another couple of years 🙂
During the past week, two more gifts arrived by mail. The first one was presumably the last Christmas gift from one of my German friends:
The reason I didn’t post it right away was that I forgot to take a picture of the cookies, and then I kept forgetting, and the cookies kept disappearing :). I still have some left back home, but now I am traveling, and I thought it was not fair to wait till February :).
And on Friday, just a couple of hours before I headed to the airport, I received a package from my friend Lena form Ann Arbor:
And I am sure you guessed which one was my favorite: a kolacki ornament!
Thursday and Friday were super-hectic because my time-sensitive project at work re-emerged with almost the same deadline, but now with me traveling. In addition, I needed to significantly modify both of my PGConf.dev submissions. I submitted everything more than two weeks ago, because I didn’t want to submit at the last minute, and I had to do it anyway, with the submission deadline being the EOD Friday.
With all of the above, I had very little sleep since Wednesday. Even though the show on Wednesday ended early, I couldn’t go to bed because I saw a new conference sponsor sign up, so I had to respond immediately and send a contract to sign. For some reason, I could not fall asleep for a while after that, and this pattern has been going on since then. Usually, I can fall asleep immediately when my head hits a pillow, and that’s one of the reasons a short sleep is enough for me. Something got broken, and even though I was very tired, I couldn’t fall asleep, and since Wednesday, my sleep pattern is completely messed up, so my goal for the next several days is to get it back on track.
Since I was packing for my trip in a half-sleep mode, I was sure I had forgotten something. One thing I realized on Thursday evening was that I couldn’t find my new good presenter, and it was already too late to order a new one. Boris said he will lend me one of his, but I know it won’t be as good as the one I had, and I can’t figure out why mine was missing.
What appeared to be more critical was that it wasn’t until I arrived in Helsinki last night that I realized that I hadn’t pack any extra jeans. I am not sure how this happened, but now it’s a problem – we left for Vienna early in the morning, and we will come back late on Tuesday evening, so no shopping till Wednesday sometime. Unfortunately, airport duty-free shops have only super-fashionable jeans, and I do not like the wide-leg look that is now popular. And I do not want to spend time shopping in Vienna – we have better things to do!
To finish on a positive note, one of my Thursday accomplishments was moving the box with all cookie-related items back to storage. This box is huge and so heavy that I dreaded taking it down and putting it up on the top shelf, and I still do not know how I managed to do it, but I did!
On Wednesday, I went to see the first show of the year of my Broadway subscription: Eureka Day.
This Timeline Theater production was performed at the Broadway Playhouse by the Water Tower. I have mixed feelings about this venue: it’s further from the Loop, so I need to plan for an almost 40-minute commute, including the wait (or walking for approximately the same time), and also, it is often very cold inside, but I really like the house layout (a better view from virtually any seat), and faster commute back home.
The plot is as timely as it can be. A private school in California, based on principles of consensus and inclusion, where no decisions can be made unless all Board members agree, faces an outbreak of mums. The events take place during the 2018/19 school year, when Zoom is still new and largely unfamiliar, and a quarantine decision is not taken lightly. And then comes the contradiction between parents who want to change the school rules to make vaccinations mandatory and anti-vaxxers, some of whom have deeply personal reasons to refuse to vaccinate their children.
I really liked how the Zoom message exchange was displayed on a big screen, revealing very common conversation patterns between the parties.
For those who have time to read the Behind-the-scenes booklet for Eureka Day, here is the link. There is a lot of interesting information about the history of vaccination in the world and in the US specifically. The most interesting part is that the play was actually written in 2018, before the pandemic, and now it’s hard to believe the choice of dates isn’t intentional!
Unfortunately, I didn’t find any video clips from this play. If you find any, let me know, and I will add them to the post!
On Tuesday, we had the first meetup of 2026, and it was such a great start to the new year! I was so happy to see many familiar faces, as well as first-timers. We had great attendance (one of those rare situations when I didn’t order enough pizza :)), and Ryan Booz, one of the speakers who never fails me, gave a great talk on configuring Postgres for effective logging and query-optimization analysis. I liked the fact that we had thirty participants that early in the year, when people just start to get back to their regular activity level. More importantly, we now have a group of active members who not only keep coming to the meetups but also actively listen, participate in discussions, and stay long after the presentation ends, discussing what they just heard, sharing experiences, suggesting future topics, and talking about how we can make Postgres more appealing to application developers! I always have to remind the last group of people staying late that, as much as I love them all, I need to close the house, but those are my happiest moments!
On days like that, I have this strong feeling of community building happening right here, and all my work is not in vain.
Trump administration hit with federal lawsuit over ‘occupation of Illinois and Chicago’
The new lawsuit makes claims about the feds’ capture of biometric data, warrantless arrests, immigration enforcement at “sensitive locations” like courthouses and schools, the swapping of license plates and trespassing on private property.
Illinois and Chicago on Monday accused federal immigration officials of an illegal occupation that’s led to “fear,”“indiscriminate violence,” and an “impermissible interference with state sovereignty” designed to force local leaders to abandon critical public policy.
They did so in a new federal lawsuit that amounts to the broadest challenge yet to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign. It accuses the feds of an “organized bombardment,”in which “uniformed, military-trained personnel, carrying semi-automatic firearms and military-grade weaponry, have rampaged for months.”
“Illinois and Chicago seek to vindicate their sovereign authority to govern, grow, and maintain public order and stability against an unchecked federal government,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit is similar to, but goes further than, the high-profile lawsuit brought by protesters, media and clergy last fall that challenged the feds’ tactics. U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued an historic order in that case in November, limiting the feds’ use of force.
The plaintiffs in that case have sought its dismissal. But Ellis hesitated to grant their request after the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week. Now state lawyers have sought to have their new case assigned to Ellis, given the similarities.
A hearing on the question has been set for Thursday. President Barack Obama named Ellis to the bench in 2013. For now, the new case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden in 2024.
Minnesota officials also filed a similar lawsuit Monday.
The Trump administration suffered repeated losses at Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Courthouse since the start of the immigration enforcement campaign known as “Operation Midway Blitz.” The state and city already sued successfully to block Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops last fall. They even handed Trump a loss at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dirksen Federal Courthouse, 219 S. Dearborn St. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times
Now their new lawsuit makes claims about the feds’ capture of biometric data, warrantless arrests, immigration enforcement at “sensitive locations” like courthouses and schools, the swapping of license plates and trespassing on private property.
It points out that, for decades, federal agents enforced immigration laws and arrested individuals subject to removal “without significant impact on public order and safety.” But since September, they “have imported interdiction tactics from the border into Chicago’s neighborhoods, and then, as one senior official put it … ‘push[ed] the envelope.’”
The lawsuit seeks an order barring U.S. Customs and Border Protection from conducting civil immigration enforcement in Illinois without Congressional approval, and ending policies that have led to the biometric scanning, the concealment of license plates and warrantless arrests.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the complaint “reads like a far-left manifesto, not a serious lawsuit.”
“The Trump administration is enforcing federal law and arresting criminal illegal aliens in cities across the country,” she said. “Chicago’s lawsuit uses aggressive rhetoric meant to smear law enforcement officers and incite violence against them.”
Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who has not ruled out a 2028 presidential run, said, “in the face of the Trump administration’s cruelty and intimidation, Illinois is standing up against the attacks on our people.”
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul
Attorney General Kwame Raoul added that, “Border Patrol agents and [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers have acted as occupiers rather than officers of the law.”
And Mayor Brandon Johnson said that, “the Trump administration has repeatedly violated the law and undermined public trust.”
Their lawsuit comes amid growing outrage about the feds’ tactics, especially since the fatal shooting of Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross. Questions have also been raised about state officials’ ability to prosecute federal agents.
The new lawsuit refers to “the occupation of Illinois and Chicago” by immigration agents. It echoes claims from the National Guard litigation, arguing that the feds are trying to punish the state and city, especially over their so-called sanctuary jurisdiction status.
That means local authorities won’t assist ICE in tracking down immigrants without legal status.
“The federal government’s menacing, violent, and unlawful incursion impedes Illinois and Chicago from carrying out core sovereign functions in violation of the Tenth Amendment,”it alleges.
The lawsuit points to two shootings in the Chicago area committed by immigration officers — the Sept. 12 fatal shooting of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez and the Oct. 4 shooting of Marimar Martinez by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.
“Hundreds of residents have been injured by Border Patrol’s widespread use of tear gas in residential neighborhoods, including children, the elderly, and first responders,” the lawsuit alleges.
Beyond that, the lawsuit alleges that Border Patrol and ICE have used an app called Mobile Fortify to scan the fingerprints and faces of people in Illinois including a U.S. citizen, a teenager, and a man on his way to work.
It says the feds have “unlawfully arrested dozens of U.S. citizens across the country” under an illegal warrantless arrest policy, likely including many in Illinois.
And it complains of a “proliferation of immigration enforcement activity at and near sensitive locations including courthouses, daycares and preschools, K-12 schools, community colleges, healthcare facilities, homeless shelters, and domestic violence shelters.”
Among other incidents, it cites the Nov. 5 incident in which federal agents entered the Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center and arrested a teacher.
“Agents subsequently reentered the daycare, searching rooms — including rooms where children were present — and interrogating other staff as to their immigration status,” the lawsuit claims. “The daycare center closed for the remainder of the week as a result of this incident.”
The lawsuit complains that Homeland Security adopted an illegal policy “allowing immigration agents to conceal, remove, or swap legally required license plates when engaged in enforcement activities in Illinois.”
It points to Plate Watch, a hotline launched by Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias. It says Giannoulias’ office “received hundreds of reports of violations of state law governing the display of accurate license plates by vehicles which were, upon information and belief, operated by federal immigration agents.”
The lawsuit accuses immigration agents of unlawfully trespassing on private property, including at a cemetery, an open-air flea market, in residential yards and on city property.
Finally, it notes that immigration enforcement is likely to surge again in Chicago, quoting a recent social media post from U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.
“If you think we’re done with Chicago, you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself,” it said. “Don’t call it a comeback; we’re gonna be here for years.”
Just finished this book (“The Serfdom in Russia”). I rarely blog anything about the books I read in Russian, but I wanted to share my thoughts about this particular one.
In the preface, the author states that “we” do not know much about this period of Russian history and that even progressive historians and political figures have always been non-specific about how and what exactly was going on during this period.
I thought that this statement didn’t apply to me, but I was wrong. I still hadn’t thought through many details, even when I knew them.
The book goes in-depth in describing the unthinkable treatment of serves, even by the “good masters,” but one tiny mention struck me the most. That’s when the author recalls the episode from War and Peace, when Natasha Rostova is ready to go to bed and calls her maid to blow out the candle by her bed instead of blowing it out herself. Perhaps the most striking thing was that I never noticed anything wrong about it before.
A recent Time Magazine article 8 Ways to Become a Nicer Person. I think that at the time when tensions are high, it’s important to know how not to put extra stress on people around you without compromising your values. Full text below:
Hettie's Reflections 