I have to admit it: I have an update phobia. I know that I have to run the regular updates on my apple phone and on my windows PC but try to postpone them. Because I have this phobia that after the update -that is supposed to keep my PC save and to make me more effective with my computer – nothing works anymore.  Before doing the major windows update, I figured I will go to Berlin first. I am back now from Berlin where I haven’t been since the fall of the wall.

I went there for the awards of the Institute for Art and Olfaction. What a blast. An amazing crowd, lots of friends and colleagues and a cheerful happy gathering. I had the pleasure and honor to present the finalists of the Artisan category.

It was a wonderful event and a great opportunity to catch up with fellow perfumers and Luca Turin. He will do another edition of the book. THE book, maybe in another format, but I am so looking forward to hearing his voice again.

Finally, back from a booming city, I did the update. Yesterday. And guess what: My phobia was totally justified. Right now, I am reindexing my outlook. As I have Gigabites of data there, in my mail archive, it takes for ever. And I had to figure out to get write access to ALL files again… In the end CMD chkdsk and a few other things seem to have done the trick.
It always, always, always feels very, very, very odd when in the days of self driving cars you have to dig into system tools. Basically, you – the user- has to start fiddling with the skeleton that’s behind it all. Scary.

But it works again. And to be honest, the machine, the “thing” that I got a while ago from Microsoft, a Surface 4, is amazing. It’s just the software that sometimes … well: It gets messy from time to time.

I guess one fine day I will ride in my self driving car and admire the car and how smoothly it runs while typing in some command lines. Let’s hope that not.