• The Week #142

    by
    • One of the "mistakes" we made when buying our house in order to save some money, was to not get kitchen cabinets installed (everything is an "option" when buying a pre-built house). Instead we opted to re-use the cabinet we were using from our apartment and get a longer cabinet to put next to it for storage. It works and holds our dishes, but it's not enough. Because there's no storage on the walls, things tend to overflow.

      I started researching getting some proper cabinets installed. So far I've mostly been looking at IKEA as the quality / pricing seems to be about right. They also have some software that will let you plan it out yourself (before visiting the stores proper). It's nothing we'll be doing in the next month or two, but perhaps later this year.
    • Leo's officially no longer a pink badge and in a couple of weeks he'll be a blue badge, the top class. Which also means: spring break started. We were planning to visit the aquarium a couple of weeks ago, but we didn't, so we went this week instead. It was packed. The pandemic is/was the worst, but it was nice how empty these kind of places were before.

      After the aquarium we visited our favorite burger joint and then went to the beach and threw rocks into the ocean for an hour. It was a lot of fun. Also, Leo walked a lot more than he used to (though there was still plenty of time up on my shoulders – I gotta get it in while I still can).
    • Japan lived up to its robotification cred abroad when I went out to dinner at the local Jonathan's. For a while now ordering at Jonathan's is done via a tablet. ( Sidebar: A tablet whose camera turns on afterwards. I always put the menu in front of it we're done to block its view, but I reckon the mics are still on.). When our food came this human sized cat robot with 4 slots rolled up to our table with our food with blue flashing lights where our food was. After we unload it, it went back to the kitchen for its next load.

      There might be a robot cat delivering your food

      Using this robot and tablet ordering, they probably had about half of the staff in the front of the house as they usually would. In-fact, the only time we had to interact with a human was: when they picked up dirty dishes, delivery of dessert (I reckon ice cream needs to go to tables express), and to pay. But even paying, there was a self-checkout. As an introvert, this is a change I can get behind.
    • Greg Jackson, the CEO of Octopus, was interviewed at SXSW. I'm happy that full interview is up on YouTube, Working at Octopus, I know what we do / how it all fits together in terms of the energy transition. But there's always bits and bobs I didn't know

      For instance, on-shore wind turbines must be painted white, so they blend in with the sky and such. Octopus has a "fan-club" (because wind turbines are effectively big fans) where people who live within a certain distance from an Octopus wind-turbine can get 20 - 50% off their electric when it's windy / really windy. To communicate this locally customers that the energy is cheap, they light them up green (for a period I reckon?), which I thought was pretty clever.
    • Media wise - I've been listening to Get On by Anuqram, not quite on repeat, but close enough. Ted Lasso S3 (the final season) came back and it's as good as ever. I also started watching Shrinking with Jason Segel and Harrison Ford. It's written (in part) by Roy fuckin' Kent and it's brilliant.

  • Checkin to Katase Higashihama Beach (η‰‡η€¬ζ±ζ΅œζ΅·ζ°΄ζ΅΄ε ΄)

    by
    in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan
    Watching the wind surfers do their thing. πŸ„πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ

  • Checkin to Dolphin Show Stadium (むルカショースタジをム)

    by
    in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan
    Watching the dolphin show. 🐬
  • by
    Making some overnight white bread. Going to cut the dough in two and bake half in the morning and let the other half chill in the fridge a couple days and sour up a bit.

  • Capturing magic

    by
    When I first started blogging again and then building Tanzawa (the custom CMS that powers my site) a couple years ago, I forwent adding comments. People (who knew) could comment on my blog using webmentions from their own blog, or if I was backfeeding them from a silo using brid.gy.

    My thinking at the time was that people aren't going to read my blog anyways, those that do probably have their own IndieWeb blogs, and backfeeding will take care of the remainder. And I didn't want to deal with spam. I'm not sure all of that's true. ( I still don't want to deal with spam.)

    I've been searching the magic that was blogging ~20 years ago. You'd write posts on your site and somehow, through the magic of the internet, people would find it and they'd leave a comment. Often their message included a link to their own site (as a field in the form, not in the comment – that'd just be spam). And you'd visit their site and leave a comment. And before you knew it, you had a new internet buddy in who knows where. I still keep in contact with some people I met this way (though via messaging apps).

    The core enabler of this magic was that there was a no-fuss way to interact directly with the author of the blog you were reading. It didn't even require an account most of the time. Communities could form on any given site because of this one feature.Β 

    Maybe it's time I look into adding comments on the blog. I might capture a bit of magic.
Previous 157 of 721 Next