• Checkin to Blue Bottle Coffee

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    in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
    Taking a much needed day off. Iced latte and a lemonade.

  • The Week #259

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    • 💔 Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after take off. Usually when these accidents happen they happen far away with people I do not know. They're always tragic, but they're "just" the news. This time was different. Maybe you guessed that when I posted at 1:30am. This time I lost a dear colleague  and fellow Commrade (what we call members of the Comms team at work), Heer Baxi.

      Heer was my co-captain at work, my counter part on the product side. She was smart and kind and a diligent worker. We talked most everyday. She'd get on early calls with the team and clients in APAC. Even in the most difficult situations she remained calm and positive. Her influence at Kraken went well beyond the Comms team and she was loved by clients and partners alike.

      After her trip to India we were planning on a trip to Tokyo so we could plan out our strategy for the next ~year of work. Where did the team and products need to be and how are we going to get there. 30 minute calls at the opposite end of the work day make those kinds of discussions difficult. They call for zero-lag conversations and enough time and space so that all of the dopey ideas can come out. The next few years are going to exciting and I was so looking forward to leading the group together.

      It hurts. But the support I received from my co-workers helps it hurt less. All of the hugs. Walk and talks. To steal a quote, bad things shouldn't happen to good people, and Heer is the best of people.
    • 🎳 I thought this week's post would be just the single point above. It felt so all encompassing. But then I remembered some advice from another co-worker about handling grief and how being present in the moment and finding something you enjoy can help.

      Sunday was Father's Day. Yumi and Leo got me this sweet elastic band for my bento box which has tako-san wiener on it. It goes really well with the dark wood of my bento box.

      We went bowling first thing in the morning. Leo has gotten strong enough that he no longer needs the little slide to get the ball down the lane. He also managed to get two strikes and his pure joy and excitement when he did is something I don't want to ever forget. After bowling we went for lunch as a family at Pepita Lion (so soon again!) and I thought going a bit early would mean we don't need to wait. But turns out it's father's day and all of the other families with kids also had the same idea, so we had to wait (but only for 10 minutes).
    • 🌏 I think I've switched to Vivaldi. I'm not (yet) using it any differently than Firefox, but that day will come soon. Why? Mozilla seems to be shoving AI and random things into Firefox and it seems like they're just not focusing on making a better browser. I kinda hate that using Vivaldi gives Chrome more rendering engine dominance, but alas.

  • The Week #258

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    • 🏀 Leo has been asking for a basketball for weeks. He didn't have enough to buy one, but I told him I'd help him. We went to the sports shop and looked at the basketballs. At first I went straight for the basketball I had (orange Spalding), but it was ¥3300 – just over 3x what Leo had. We were about to get it and then I saw they had some black no-name basketballs for ¥1500. I showed them to Leo and told him this was closer to his budget and...to my surprise (as it's not orange) he agreed. 

      We went to the cash register to pay and, turns out, they take points and I had just enough points to get the price down to where he could afford it! So Leo bought his basketball by himself entirely with his own money! He's proud and telling everyone 😀.
    • 🌳 With basketball in hand, the next day we went to the closest basketball hoop we know of Shonandai park. It's too high for Leo to be shoot and make a basket, but we had fun anyways. In typical Japanese park fashion, the hoop doesn't have a proper court, just hard dirt, but I look forward to the day when we can play some HORSE. Leo is determined to get big and strong and tall so he can get that ball into the basket.
    • 🏫 We started exploring the possibility of sending Leo to an international school rather than local public schools. The catalyst for this is we don't feel like the system is providing the kind of education and thinking we want to encourage. There are some good parts of the system as well, school lunch, responsibility for the classroom spring to mind first.

      Japanese schools are always teaching for the next test. Junior high entrance exams, high school entrance exams, college entrance exams and those exams often encourage/require kids to attend cram-schools. For international schools he'd attend the same school for all 3-levels so that entire system just doesn't apply.

      However, the thing I'm most skeptical about is the commute to the school. We bought this house with the idea being he'd be a nice easy 3 minute walk away. The potential schools are all in Naka-ward in Yokohama so they'll require 30 minutes to an hour to get to. Which I think I can handle in the mornings. But how about the evening pickup? The logistics make me question the long-term viability of living where we do. Families move to be closer to schools all the time (at least in the US), but also it's not an immediate concern. We haven't even applied (and hence got a spot).

  • The Week #257

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    • 🪐 Leo had a field trip to the Shonandai Culture Center, which he's been going to since he was one. Sometimes it's nice when field trips take you some place new, but this time it was an old favorite. Though it was his first time going with his friends, so I suppose that's new.

      He had such a good time that he came back and said "Dad, I want to go to the culture center with you on the weekend!". And so we did. We also saw a show at the planetarium, always fun (and a good place to almost catch a nap 😉).
    • 🍝 After the culture center and an hour at the park, Leo and I had a guys night out and ate dinner at Pepita Lion.  I had fresh pasta with nama-ham and greens. Leo had the tomato omelette rice and we split an order of fries. The food was excellent as always. Although it was too late for coffee, their coffee is really good as well. They were roasting coffee out front as they usually do, which is not something you usually see and equally excited both Leo and myself.

      How nice is it to go to a favorite place again instead of the usual chain family restaurants? So so nice. And it's supporting a local business that's been in the neighborhood for longer than I've been alive. If you're in the neighborhood, I highly recommend a visit. Much easier to just drop in now that they take credit cards/touch payment.
    • 💪 I switched from a short program to a medium program in alpha progression (weight training app) and it (predictably) is making a difference. Seeing the number of reps and or weight go up each week is motivating. I'm not sure how accurate my scale is in terms of body fat / muscle mass (as there's nothing to hold on to to get electric impedance testing from my upper body), but clothes are fitting different so that's all the matters.

  • The Week #256

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    • 🏮 We went to the annual international festival at my alma matter in Totsuka. And like I (probably) blogged last year, this year it hit all of the nostalgia. The campus is full of forest and has a bridge with an excellent view of Fuji, you could really see yourself doing some quality thinking out there. The thing I think I was the most nostalgic for was the amount of headspace I had back in uni to study and think about the problems facing the world.

      This year Watanabe Youichi, famous war photojournalist and  alumni came to speak. We attended his event, but had to leave 10 minutes in because Leo was bored, but Leo was paying attention. As soon as we got outside he asked why the children had guns, did they just find them? Shouldn't the adults keep them from them? We explained that not everywhere is as peaceful as it is in Japan and that we're fortunate to live in such a place where we do not need to worry about such things.

      The informatics majors setup a room to teach kids programming with Scratch, which drew Leo in. They had 4 laptops setup with a half-finished game, then they'd help walk you through how to finish it off. Leo built the last part of an air hockey game. I think having the app in Japanese probably helped, though it was full of kanji he doesn't know.  I feel like I'm going to have to get a computer sooner or later so we can do Scratch properly...

      Kanachu, the local bus company, brought one of their EV busses for people to see – and it was pretty great. It felt like it was a bit larger inside than their usual busses and there's usb-a sockets at every seat so you can charge your devices as you travel. We got to sit in the driver's seat where they told us there are 11 mirrors that the driver uses to check all of the angles. The battery is also large enough that they can drive it all day on a single charge. But the most surprising thing was that the bus was made by BYD – not one of the Japanese bigs. Though the fact that it's an EV should make that obvious it's not Japanese as they're currently lagging Apparently these usually run along/around Kamakura because there's more/better infrastructure for charging overnight. Maybe I'll make a mission to ride one of these.
    • 🍻 I went out for dinner and beers with a friend near Tokyo. We messaged at the start of the year that we should hang out, then 5 months passed. Just as I was thinking "man, we said we should hang, we should hang" and he messaged me. I'm glad he did.
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