• It's not everyday a man goes to war, but this week started my war with the crows. I usually try to keep on good terms with them because crows are smart, their beaks are ginormous and I stand out - they know where I live. They started razing the trash.

Like most trash areas in our neighborhood, ours is a collapsable green box made of green netting with an aluminum frame. Before we moved here a truck backend in to ours and broke / deformed our top. More over, most trash spots are on flat ground, our's is on a small decline. With the decline unless the sides are square crows and pick at the trash from the gap between the ground and the frame. Since the truck hit our trash, when the box is square there's a crow-size hole to let them come and go freely from the top.

The provisions that the neighborhood associated put on helped – the panels tied to the netting kept the crows at bay. But they were just thin styrofoam and degraded after a couple of months. Rather than get more thing styrofoam that looks temporary, I took matters into my own hands. I found some nice hard plastic (like you'd make a lawn sign out of, but thicker) and tie-wrapped it to the netting so that it extends a bit beyond the frame closing most of the gaps. I'm happy to report we won the first battle. Let's see how it continues to hold up.

Being an independent journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I always reasoned that I needed a decent computer and that I need to pay for quality.

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I haven't been posting all of my runs to my blog lately, but this week I managed to catch the sunrise and the sunset at almost the same location. Yokohama is the best. 🇯🇵

Sun goes up.

Sun goes down

Code With Me is a new service created by JetBrains for collaborative development and pair programming.

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Meet the new AI that knows you better than you know yourself

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• In addition to reading and writing notes about Atomic Habits, I've also started to re-read some books that inspired me in the past and write notes so I can reference them later. This week is the fantastic book Web Form Design ( my notes ). Do you really need a book about such a mundane topic? When you consider that forms are the bottleneck for all online interactions, yes.


• I managed to run 5km 3 times last week using Habit Stacking. The habit is basically as follows "After a cup of coffee at 5:30am I will run for 30 minutes". Since I'm not fast enough for a 30 minute 5km yet, it usually works out to 30 ~ 35 minutes.


• Stacking my running habit around coffee is what seems to work for me. When I first started running (and managed to sustain the habit for 5 or 6 months) in 2018, it was also similar. Except Leo was an infant and I couldn't make coffee at 4:30am without fear of waking him. Since it was summer and the sun rises around then in Japan, I'd go for a run with my endpoint being one of the local 7-11's, where I could get an ice coffee and walk home.


• I tried the Plant Balls on a trip to ikea, and they're proper tasty. Technically I got the meatballs and my wife got the plant balls and we shared one, but I think they're my new default.


• I bought my first proper bookshelf and it's in the minimal style of bookshelf I've always wanted (photo in my tweet). I wish I had the space so I could chain multiple shelves together for a wall of books. Like most of the rest of the furniture in my house, it's from Muji. And it's properly screwed into the walls because this is Japan.

Veggies balls!