Feeling rather burnt out lately. A lot of stress-inducing things beyond my control have happened this winter, and I’ve found myself forced to violate the self-imposed ‘no more than three prescription sleeping pills a week’ rule on several occasions, which is probably not a good sign.

At least things are looking up now! Most problems have been solved or at least defused, and starting today I get a whole week away from work and family.
The weather helps too! It’s getting warmer and I love that the sound of birds singing in the morning has returned.

The downside is that the dogs feel spring too, which means they do a lot of stupid stuff and consider my increasingly angry yelling to be non-binding recommendations at best, which means lots of walks on a short leash, which in turn means even more pent-up energy for the next walk. Just when we started being grateful for having made it through our youngest daughter’s puberty…

Anyways. Things are mostly looking up, so yay! I’m going to use this week to refuel and work on some absolutely useless but entertaining projects such as an analysis of our collected hotel key cards with respect to their contents and cloneability. So far I’ve found exactly one keycard that used some kind of encryption. Most keycards are just Mifare Classic cards that rely on the UID alone, and one just had an unprotected data block with the plaintext room number. That’s basically one small step above the door locks accepting a handwritten note saying “master key”. This is going to be interesting.